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PoliGAF 2017 |OT2| Well, maybe McMaster isn't a traitor.

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Good God, the sheer amount of evil pouring out this week from the GOP is insane:

Healthcare
Taxes
Net Neutrality
VOICE
NAFTA

It's just too fucking much

Today has been really disheartening and to top it off we have motherfuckers in here waging a war on Mexican food. Nothing is sacred, god is dead.
 

B-Dubs

No Scrubs
Shame it was such a poor system they switched to, though. It's not really a significant move forward on FPTP.

It's better than what they had. What they had is the only reason LePage kept winning. If they had ranked choice voting either of the last two elections he never would have made it in.

EDIT: I get a pretty good laugh out of the Dems in Maine wanting Steven King to try running.
 
Shame it was such a poor system they switched to, though. It's not really a significant move forward on FPTP.
I mean, nothing will beat list PR but I don't know what's wrong with ranked choice compared to FPTP?

Why are we fighting about Mexican food when TRUMP IS PRESIDENT. Liberals MUST come together!
Mexican food being terrible is why liberals are out of touch with Middle America and why Trump won.
 

pigeon

Banned
Mexican food is the most socialist food.

Literally they just have a common pool of ingredients from which all dishes draw according to their needs.
 

B-Dubs

No Scrubs
Especially in Maine which <3s 3rd party candidates.

Exactly. This is going to work out great for Maine because it won't punish the people of the state for loving third-party candidates as much as they do. The Dems and left-leaning independents up there must be jumping for joy. So long as they don't hit each other too hard they can keep the GOP out of the seat.
 
I'm just trying to establish the superiority of my ethnic group's food over inferior people's.

benito-mussolini-200.jpg
SURPRISE -- THAT DEAD, INVERTED FASCIST ASSHOLE WAS NAMED AFTER A MEXICAN!!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Juárez
 
I gave up trying to read all of the Obama Paid Speech stuff.

I saw he was criticized for taking the money, and if donating, not publicizing it. I also thought the deal wasn't final yet? Is he supposed to put out a press release about what he is going to do in the future?

And people gave Clinton grief for her paid speeches when she donated far more to charity than she ever earned doing them. People have no perspective. People are tribal and want class warfare.

I realize this looks bad to a lot of the populace. And it looks really, really bad to me that so much of the populace has a problem with this. It's no wonder Democrats can't win elections.
 

B-Dubs

No Scrubs
Seems like 10 republicans already are against the new healthcare bill. How many are needed to block it?

About 12 more or so, which shouldn't be too hard to get. I think the GOP has about 238 seats, they need 217 for a majority. Ten defections puts them at 228, so about 12 more and it's dead.
 
Seems like 10 republicans already are against the new healthcare bill. How many are needed to block it?

20 something total, so like 10 mote. Which means the thing is dead, since congress generally votes in groups anyway since there's so many.

But really, we probably need 0, because the Democrats can filibuster it this time. Unless they can manage to pass it in 2 and a half days (and also prove it doesn't add to the deficit in 10 years), which they can't.
 
Based on my experience, Middle America loves Mexican food. Chinese food too. We must use this to drive a wedge between Trump and the heartland.
Oh, Chinese food (or at least whatever I've eaten that is called Chinese food) is great and we should be very welcoming of these kinds of foods that work hard to help America prosper.
 

kaskade

Member
About 12 more or so, which shouldn't be too hard to get. I think the GOP has about 238 seats, they need 217 for a majority. Ten defections puts them at 228, so about 12 more and it's dead.

20 something total, so like 10 mote. Which means the thing is dead, since congress generally votes in groups anyway since there's so many.

But really, we probably need 0, because the Democrats can filibuster it this time. Unless they can manage to pass it in 2 and a half days (and also prove it doesn't add to the deficit in 10 years), which they can't.

Thanks guys, I just want to see this fail again. I know it probably won't pass the senate anyway but I'd rather it just die in the house.
 
I like vaguely Indian inspired Scottish food.

Also if you want a nice little history of "Chinese" food, there's a fun documentary on Netflix about General Tso chicken and the rise of Chinese-American food.
 

dramatis

Member
"Chinese food" has very little in common with Chinese food.
I don't think you should think of it that way.

Traditionally Chinese food was divided up according to region (Sichuan, Guangdong, etc.), so I think the best way to think of American Chinese food is that it's another style brought about by the immigrants who moved here and developed their own Chinese food. It's no less Chinese than the various Chinese foods floating around China.
 

numble

Member
20 something total, so like 10 mote. Which means the thing is dead, since congress generally votes in groups anyway since there's so many.

But really, we probably need 0, because the Democrats can filibuster it this time. Unless they can manage to pass it in 2 and a half days (and also prove it doesn't add to the deficit in 10 years), which they can't.
They can still use reconciliation after this week.
 

Blader

Member
Seems like 10 republicans already are against the new healthcare bill. How many are needed to block it?

A little over 20, but I don't think the Tuesday Group, which is about 50 members, are on board. MacArthur was flying solo in his negotiations with the HFC and wasn't consulting with his caucus while hammering out the new amendment.
 
I don't think you should think of it that way.

Traditionally Chinese food was divided up according to region (Sichuan, Guangdong, etc.), so I think the best way to think of American Chinese food is that it's another style brought about by the immigrants who moved here and developed their own Chinese food. It's no less Chinese than the various Chinese foods floating around China.

Hmm, this is a good point.

And Chinese food does vary a huge amount region to region. I eat a lot of food common to Jilin because my girlfriend is from Jilin, but I'm not sure someone from south China would have a similar cuisine at all.
 

Pusha_93

Neo Member
So that exemption for Congress that pissed everybody of? MacArthur said they would AFTER the amendment passes. Is that even a thing?
 

pigeon

Banned
I gave up trying to read all of the Obama Paid Speech stuff.

I saw he was criticized for taking the money, and if donating, not publicizing it. I also thought the deal wasn't final yet? Is he supposed to put out a press release about what he is going to do in the future?

Uh, yes? That is a thing that people do constantly and routinely?

And people gave Clinton grief for her paid speeches when she donated far more to charity than she ever earned doing them.

So, I mean, then she should've sent the money from the speeches directly to the charities and avoided the entire issue.

This is a weird argument to me because "they could easily just do this thing that would make it clear that there's no ethical conflict, they're just choosing not to" doesn't really make the situation better!

I realize this looks bad to a lot of the populace. And it looks really, really bad to me that so much of the populace has a problem with this. It's no wonder Democrats can't win elections.

To be honest, I doubt most of the populace cares at all. Everybody is probably in favor of Obama getting paid.

I'm not pretending that there's a huge secret majority of Bernistas for whom this is a key vote issue. I just personally think Obama should do better because ethics are important.
 
D

Deleted member 231381

Unconfirmed Member
I mean, nothing will beat list PR but I don't know what's wrong with ranked choice compared to FPTP?

I think the main value in democracy as we currently have it is the deliberative aspect. The voting is (almost) unimportant - if all we were concerned about in democracy is what people thought, we could just replace all politicians with opinion polls that required mandatory participation and were publicly funded to ensure sufficiently accurate margins. We don't do that because politics has a more important role before you even get to voting - the actual political bit, where someone has to stand up, explain their values, and try and get you to support those values, or persuade you of those values, or justify those values. That's what it means to be human, what differentiates us from cattle - the making of those kinds of decisions, that moral reasoning process. Voting just concludes that process.

Accordingly, democracy is good to the extent that it cultivates that aspect of us. Better democracies are the ones in which people have every incentive to make genuine moral arguments on the basis of deeply-held beliefs, rather than ones in which morality comes pre-packaged and voters are treated like consumers, where politicians attempt to avoid argument and are unwilling to engage in the moral persuasive process, all because the voting process dictates it would be impractical to do otherwise. And under that principle, AV is a rather bad voting system.

Dimensional models are a very clumsy way of looking at these things, but they can tell us some half-truths - FPTP has a stable equilibrium for even-numbered party systems where there are two parties at every n/2th point and no stable equilibrium for odd-numbered party systems, hence it tends to collapse to two centrist parties. If you look at AV, the stable equilibrium, no matter how many parties you have, is all parties coalesce at the centre - in that respect, it's no different to FPTP.

You get a few more options to choose from than FPTP, but the result of that is that politics is fought on issues of who is best to deliver the exact same policy - your debates aren't about principles, they're about bureaucracy. This is an improvement on FPTP, because being able to choose between four near-identical parties and two near-identical parties probably still has better outcomes, but it's not really a significant step forward.
 

Ogodei

Member
I see this as catering to the whims of people who want to treat politics like they're customizing a 3DS.

Too many parties creates paralysis, a la Israel, where Netanyahu's majority is predicated upon a tiny party with only a handful of MK's staying loyal to the coalition.

A 5% threshold for representation might be good for parliaments in general, that way you don't end up with single-member caucuses in your assembly.

Same time, forcing to rely on coalitions means that the different factions have more power as explicit parties, meaning more diversity of thought. If the Freedom Caucus was the Freedom Party and having to negotiate with the GOP, lest the coalition collapse, there'd be more room for give and take because there's no pressure for all Republicans to vote for something they don't like just for the sake of party unity, since the party is smaller and more united.
 
Is there some hidden benefit you see in acting as though the GOP are god-like svengalis that I don't know about?

I'm not sure I am acting like they are godlike svengalis, but they have constantly kicked our asses for a decade in State Legislatures, Governorships, and Congress. The reason losing the Presidency hurt so much was because the last thing we had.

The GOP is dominating the debate. They are the ones framing things. Trump can tweet a lie that Obama wiretapped him and over half of republicans immediately say it happened. So I am going to push back against the idea that we can just stand back and do nothing and wait for the GOP to mess up. That's not going to happen. What we get back is what we take back.
 
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