Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

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Thad
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Thad » Tue Mar 14, 2017 11:45 am

Adding: on the other hand, "the tactics that work for the right won't necessarily work for the left" is good advice (and a point I just got through making myself, upthread), and it's worth keeping in mind.

It's just that, in this particular instance, it feels like an endorsement of a status quo that is very clearly not working.

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Mongrel
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Tue Mar 14, 2017 1:40 pm

A good point made by another fellow I know in response to that article was that, maybe this isn't true for Europe, but in the US at least Democrats have typically PROMISED left-wing policies and then not really enacted any of them when elected, generally following the Clinton pattern of right-wing lite.

So In the US at least it's not fair to say the argument is "we tried left-wing policies and they didn't work", because the last thirty years have featured bait-and-switch tactics by Democrats.

Büge wrote:
Mongrel wrote:They don't mention Canada at all, but that would only support the thesis because here we've had probably the world's oldest and most comprehensive pro-multicultural educational system and government


Minus that whole residential school/aboriginal genocide hiccup, of course.

Well, the underlying thesis is "people are racist" so I don't see why Canadians should get a free pass. :P

To be fair though, the residential schools program preceded our pro-multicultural stance by several decades and ended not too long after pro-multicultural policies were enacted. Which doesn't erase anything, and there's a fraught history of a different kind with natives of that era, (mainly around floating the idea of ending status, which was seen as an assimilation attempt). But I'd like think that while we're still struggling to find answers in the current era, at least almost everyone agrees the status quo is no good and would like to try and change it for the better.

In the context of the article, you can certainly find cranky white folks right now saying things like "Don't give them another cent. In fact don't give 'em a cent at all!", but that's not the narrative at the national level, or a policy the government is considering, thank god.
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Friday
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Friday » Tue Mar 14, 2017 8:48 pm

Well, the underlying thesis is "people are racist" so I don't see why Canadians should get a free pass. :P


Yeah, every time I see some (non-american, generally) talking about how Americans are soooooo racist, I just sort of blink at them slowly and then ask them what percentage of their country is all the same color.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby sei » Tue Mar 14, 2017 10:40 pm

tolerance is easy when they're not in your back yard
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Thad
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Thad » Wed Mar 15, 2017 12:36 am

Mongrel wrote:A good point made by another fellow I know in response to that article was that, maybe this isn't true for Europe, but in the US at least Democrats have typically PROMISED left-wing policies and then not really enacted any of them when elected, generally following the Clinton pattern of right-wing lite.

So In the US at least it's not fair to say the argument is "we tried left-wing policies and they didn't work", because the last thirty years have featured bait-and-switch tactics by Democrats.


Right.

And while my knowledge of UK politics is all secondhand, I'd consider the possibility that Labour's recent troubles aren't a repudiation of Corbyn so much as continuing, long-term damage by Blair and Brown.

MEANWHILE:

I try not to hold a double-standard WRT the CBO. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong, it makes educated guesses about complex economic issues. In this instance, "lower deficit/lots of people kicked off insurance" seems not only plausible but straight-up Occam's Razor.

I'm seeing a lot of press about how much trouble the AHCA is in, how the right wing of the party hates it because it doesn't go far enough, the opportunists hate it because it hurts their chances of being reelected, and Trump's tepid endorsements clearly indicate that he's ready to beat a hasty retreat if it doesn't pass or if it passes and is unpopular -- maybe so, but this is no time for complacency. I'd love to see it fail because even Republicans won't pass it, and I'll grant that Tea Partiers have a pretty well-established history of sticking to their guns no matter what the party leadership tells them to do, but we're so far past the point of shit I never thought would happen that I get really uneasy when the Washington Post and Politico confidently predict that some outcome has no chance of happening.

Besides, the "if everybody hates it then it must be good" fallacy is a strong one in politics.

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Wed Mar 15, 2017 3:08 am

Friday wrote:
Well, the underlying thesis is "people are racist" so I don't see why Canadians should get a free pass. :P


Yeah, every time I see some (non-american, generally) talking about how Americans are soooooo racist, I just sort of blink at them slowly and then ask them what percentage of their country is all the same color.

To be fair, I know multiple Australians who have visited America and they were like "Wow, this place is racist even by our standards."

Though that's technically a supporting point in your favour because Australians are quite significantly not all the same colour, no matter how many might claim it's all white.
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Friday
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Friday » Wed Mar 15, 2017 4:49 am

colour


you might be the same COLOR as me, Mongrel, but i can be racist to you anyway

jk i say alu-minium instead of alum-i-num and prefer Theatre to Theater

Centre is weird though, what the fuck
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby zaratustra » Wed Mar 15, 2017 6:39 am

speaking as a brazilian: y'all asses are white

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sei
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby sei » Wed Mar 15, 2017 6:53 am

but are brazillians actually a race or are they more like electronic locusts that eat f2p game communities

zara could basically be that one zappy fucker from gremlins 2 and none of us would know better
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Esperath » Wed Mar 15, 2017 6:54 am

speaking as a dragon maid: y'all asses need creamy tails
pisa katto

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pisa katto

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sei
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby sei » Wed Mar 15, 2017 7:13 am

just because you can regenerate it doesn't mean we want to eat it

also your wee cousin over there has a fucking scrotum at the end of hers what the fuck even
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Wed Mar 15, 2017 2:08 pm

Friday wrote:
colour


you might be the same COLOR as me, Mongrel, but i can be racist to you anyway


When my brother and I were kids in the 80's, my dad would make jokes about Andrew and I growing up to become terrorists, usually involving goofy rube-goldberg instructions that began with "First! Strap fifty sticks of dynamite to your body. Second! Get a very loonnng fuse." in a comically bad Arab accent.

We all thought this was hilarious. Even my mom mostly just thought it was harmless silliness. In the 80's.

What was sort of funny was my dad was recently telling the same story to a coworker from Pakistan for the same reason I tell it (to show how times had changed, more innocent days etc.) and how flabbergasted the guy was, like he wasn't even mad this was something so insanely beyond the pale to him "You told your OWN KIDS they would grow up to be TERRORISTS?!?!?!?"

EDIT: As an aside to that, SCTV used to have a routine featuring two hayseeds with a two-bit variety show which would always end with them saying "And hope the good lord'll take a likin' to ya, and blow ya up real good!" and they would just... explode, as only mid-budget comedy characters in an 80's show could. As kids, we thought was ENORMOUS fun and one of the best bits of the show. Of course they were always back to do it again next time.

We knew it was fake as anything, but I imagine this cartoonish notion still coloured Andrew's and my ideas of what it might be like to blow ourselves up. Hell, my dad probably had the very same routine in mind, since we all loved that one and quoted it often. Blowing yourself up FOR REAL was still something so abstract and distant to us then.

EDIT2:



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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby nosimpleway » Wed Mar 15, 2017 3:21 pm

zaratustra wrote:speaking as a brazilian: y'all asses are white

Yes but it comes from a long history of European racism where it's possible to be the wrong kind of white

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby IGNORE ME » Wed Mar 15, 2017 3:56 pm

I try to remind people that we were the ones getting detained at immigration less than a hundred years ago, but nobody on either side of the culture war seems to give a fuck.

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Wed Mar 15, 2017 4:16 pm

Interestingly, Vox itself has another article countering (only somewhat) the earlier one, Democrats see a path to success in rust belt states using harder leftist messaging

There's also this more substantiative review from NY Magazine, one which tries to look where the original Vox article didn't: At what solutions might work (they mention Canada! And say pretty much the exact same thing I did - that replicating our system would take a long time).
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Wed Mar 15, 2017 4:17 pm

Brentai wrote:I try to remind people that we were the ones getting detained at immigration less than a hundred years ago, but nobody on either side of the culture war seems to give a fuck.


As always, Blazing Saddles maintains its relevance

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Büge » Wed Mar 15, 2017 4:26 pm

On that note, Happy St. Patrick's Day! :D
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Yoji » Wed Mar 15, 2017 6:21 pm

Mongrel wrote:
Brentai wrote:I try to remind people that we were the ones getting detained at immigration less than a hundred years ago, but nobody on either side of the culture war seems to give a fuck.

As always, Blazing Saddles maintains its relevance.

I was thinking about that when the first Muslim ban was ordered. The Bastard tried to weasel out of it- among other ways- by saying he was banning people from nations with a history of terrorism. "Great! So that means we're keeping those IRA fuckers out at long last!"
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Wed Mar 15, 2017 9:01 pm

Hardly Ideal wrote:
Mongrel wrote:
Brentai wrote:I try to remind people that we were the ones getting detained at immigration less than a hundred years ago, but nobody on either side of the culture war seems to give a fuck.

As always, Blazing Saddles maintains its relevance.

I was thinking about that when the first Muslim ban was ordered. The Bastard tried to weasel out of it- among other ways- by saying he was banning people from nations with a history of terrorism. "Great! So that means we're keeping those Fenian papists out at long last!"
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Z%rø » Wed Mar 15, 2017 9:29 pm

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