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I could quibble about some of this, but it's not that important, nor even that far wrong. The real difference is the percentage of each side that currently falls into the anti-liberal group...

Sometimes, certainly not always. We could go into the origins of the current mess in detail - maybe another thread?

WAY too harsh. Agree with him or not (and I often don't), he's actually a fairly reasonable conservatieve, something we need more of. We have altogether too many of the other kind hiding in the...

Of course. Who else? Americans are no more uniquely virtuous than other human beings, and we've had our share of utterly vile people, ideas and political movements.

They did - at least sit down and shut up, if not agree. It's an extreme example, obviously, but thinking about how relatively decent ordinary people can go along when their government does...

Chait this morning: he's in good form.

And here it is! But whaddabout . . .But whaddabout . . . But whaddabout . . .But whaddabout . . .But whaddabout . . . :rolleyes:

Yes. Here's the story in the Washington Post. Tasty Kool-Aid, innit?

https://www.giantbomb.com/a/uploads/scale_small/0/26/9976-koolaidman.jpg

True. Getting it right matters. And unfortunately, being of the wrong social class or race has tended to increase the chances of serious errors.

Oh, no question. Although leaving him in jail might be a worse punishment for a narcissist, and making a martyr could be risky. But again, I don't think that's what he did. Arrogant and...

So you agree with Mr Hayden. I tend not to favor the death penalty, if only because human beings make too many mistakes and sometimes convict the wrong person, but that's beside the point here. ...

Who's 'they'? The slimy chimps? :d


(Note - 'slimy chimps' comes from an excellent kid's book, 'The One and Only Ivan', written from the point of view of a gorilla. 'Slimy chimps' is a...

Again, Hayden endorsed the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953.

A thought experiment: If Mr. Trump were convicted - fair trial, proved beyond a reasonable doubt- of actually selling...

And you fell for it. :rolleyes: Even the National Review has to placate the Trumpistas.

Hayden endorsed the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, who were convicted of giving US...

Very glad to hear the good news! Y>

A subset of 'murica. We've generally had things like that, going a long way back, but rarely so prominent and powerful.

The article doesn't say much (neither did Hayden), and at the end adds on...

Boatbum, this is not even a little bit obscure. The history of how the committee was constituted is common knowledge. You can start here with Wikipedia, the section entitled 'History'.

If you...

This is, not to lean on it too hard, totally and completely false. The choice to have few Republicans on the panel was made by the House Republican leadership. They tried to appoint members who...

Oy, sorry to hear it. Hoping for the best possible outcome.

So was the same true of Jews of leaving eastern Europe in 1905? How about Irish fleeing the famine in 1850? The argument has been the same for 170 years; they aren't like us, they're worse (this...

Yes, it's something that gets them excited, just exactly like the folks in 100 years ago getting all bent out of shape about all those Italian Catholics and Russian Jews. America will never be the...

I think you're 100% wrong that 'it's not about Trump'. It's about Trump. Ms Cheney recognizes that he's a danger to the country. Most of her constituents disagree. That's the central reason she...

Right. And before Linnaeus came up with the category lepidoptera, there were no butterflies. :rolleyes: Page after page after page arguing about the definitions of words; how enlightening. ...

Me too. Not at long odds, but definitely. There are enough people in the party that can calculate the chances of a rabid wolverine winning the general election.

OK, I missed the note about whose truck it is. It's still large heavy jewelry, but why not?

An oversize padded codpiece. :rolleyes:

Describing George. as an 'erudite right wing troll' is downright bizarre. (Erudite, yes.) Or did you mean Osborne?

The True Believers will claim the dogsh!t is caviar forever, The ones around the edges, OTOH, appear to have been peeling away for some time. If a plausible RW alternative to Trump reaches the...

Meh . . . Yeah, that could possibly happen. Or maybe not. Predicting the future is hard, and prophecies of doom are good at attracting our attention.

One applicable law, emphasis added....

Orson Scott Card is another, on a smaller scale. Some of his sci-fi is first class (Pastwatch, particularly) , and his politics makes Helprin look almost liberal.

I had exactly the same reaction with Helprin; Winter's Tale is incredible - although once you know about his politics, you can see it seeping through occasionally.

I enjoyed the book. It's sometimes hard to imagine that the guy who wrote it is the same person as the loathsome conscienceless fellow running for the Senate.

Yes, great big dampers. And I'm certainly not saying that any of it would be a good idea; quite the opposite. But it would be 100% legally possible to do those things; the people could vote in...

While I have very little tolerance for Howard Zinn, I don't think even he would argue that 'Russia is liberating Ukraine from the fascist yoke'. I might be underestimating him.

This is exactly right.

Again, Mr. Trump's incompetence is by far his best feature. If he were a competent would-be dictator, he'd have at the least a significant part of the military and law enforcement loyal to him, and...

No more than 150-piece jigsaw puzzles, though.

And this is a disagreement about the definition of a word. By the dictionary definition, and by the almost-universal way the word is used today, the US is a democracy. Yes, 250 years ago the...

The True Believers, no doubt. But the ones around the edge, not members of the cult, normal Republicans?

I actually think there's a chance this might have a good effect. The real danger is not a few nut jobs, but significant parts of the police or military joining a Trumpist insurrection; that's the...

I suspect the binary distinction he's making between direct democracy (what he calls 'real' democracy) and constitutional representative democracy is part of the problem. It's a multi-dimensional...

You don't even need that. The Constitution has been changed many times, the process for doing it is 'democratic' (representative democracy) in that it depends on elected representatives of the...

Sorry, but words are things people make up, and they mean what people think they mean. 'Democracy', whether you like it or not, now has several overlapping meanings. 'Direct democracy' like the...

Again, under our system, they are, if enough of them agree.

It depends on whether you want to communicate effectively using the same language as most other people, or whether you want to be a...

OK, so 2500 years previously, some semi-legendary examples which didn't work out so well, and probably never will for any group larger than a band of hunter-gatherers. Nothing on the planet at the...

Only around the edges. The differences were way smaller than they appeared, mainly partly-futile attempts by conservative states to restrict abortion by being as annoying as possible.

But a...

I agree 100%. In fact, a mixture of capitalism and socialism appears to work much, much better than either alone, although we can quibble endlessly about the correct proportions.

Well, sort of, maybe. We've been getting progressively less and less like a loose confederation for 250 years now, and federal law overriding the wishes of some of the states (very rarely the...

And precisely where were these (direct, popular, unlimited) 'democracies' you describe in 1789?

But one way or another, the reason we describe the US (and Japan, the UK, Germany, Chile, India,...

Indeed. And if you add in rural/urban, that pretty much covers it.