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Vader

The Next President

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This is a great way for someone who has zero power or influence on policy to think.

 

This is a terrible way for someone with any power or influence on policy to think.

 

For instance, I'm a huge detractor of ACA. I think it's locked the nation into skyrocketing healthcare costs, has forced people into the arms of private insurers who want to increase their profit margins more than they want to help people, and has soothed the left into not acting on a better solution.

 

But you know what? I have damn good health insurance. I can afford to be against ACA. I'm not reliant on expanded medicare coverage or a subsidized plan. People who are in that position would disagree with me about ACA, and with good reason. That's ultimately why it's a good thing that I'm just a small man with no power -- my ideology would blind me to a good solution because it's not the best solution.

 

In the same way, I don't like DADT. But a gay kid from a poor, broken home whose only path to a college education was military service was probably damn grateful to have DADT -- he could go about his business on his own time and not be beholden to questions about it. He would think differently than me about DADT, and with good reason. His opinion wouldn't be that DADT is dehumanizing, but that it was a lifesaving avenue to a better life for himself.

 

Having ideological positions is great. They're a huge benefit in a lot of ways. But when you're dealing with real policies in the real world, things are more complicated. There isn't as much black and white. Someone isn't necessarily for us or against us, but rather they often lie somewhere in the middle.

 

For example, Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia has been a staunch opponent of LGBT rights historically, but now that Georgia's legislature is considering passing a "religious freedom" act he's come out as accepting of gays. He says that people don't need to feel threatened by people doing things they don't agree with, and he backs up his view with biblical quotes. So is he for gays or against gays? He seems to be mostly against, but it's complicated. He's somewhere in the middle, and it doesn't do anyone any good to say that Governor Deal voted against gay adoption rights in 2006 or whatever else he's done, since in 2016 he said that people should accept gay marriage even if they don't agree with it. He quoted the Bible -- as his Southern Baptist upbringing would guide him to do -- saying that people should love and accept society's outcasts. I don't have full faith that he'll push for more gay rights, but he seems to be standing up for the ones we have. Does that mean he's against us, or does it mean he's with us? I think it means it's complicated.

 

Life is complicated. Reducing things into the two categories of "good" and "bad" doesn't really help anyone make things better.

The problem is the Democratic party has seemed happy with half measures and compromises. There are not enough people in higher office who keep pushing after the initial fight is over, we need more people who treat the ACA or DADT as a first step, not the end goal. I want to vote for someone who is going to fight and keep fighting even after a decent compromise is made, because until we get all the way to a goal we shouldn't ever stop pushing.

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For instance, I'm a huge detractor of ACA. I think it's locked the nation into skyrocketing healthcare costs, has forced people into the arms of private insurers who want to increase their profit margins more than they want to help people, and has soothed the left into not acting on a better solution.

The result of compromising by the way. So the method you prefer has lead to the outcome you don't like.

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There are not enough people in higher office who keep pushing after the initial fight is over, we need more people who treat the ACA or DADT as a first step, not the end goal. 

See, I would argue that DADT was the first step. It laid the groundwork for its eventual replacement with a better policy by at least ending witch hunts and barring certain forms of harassment.

I feel the same way about the ACA (I speak as a person who would have no health insurance without it). By mandating insurance coverage for everyone and subsidizing the market, there is room to incrementally adapt the legislation to cost less and more effectively meet that universal coverage mandate. This might be wishful thinking, but we were never going to just shut down every single insurance provider in America and replace them with a single payer solution the next morning. 

We started with DADT, now we have something better. We have started ACA, and I think if we elect people who care about fighting for it we can also build something better from that too.

I'm starting my masters in Public Administration in the Fall, so yeah I'm probably more of an incrementalist than my activist friends want me to be, but I really do think an all-or-nothing approach simply doesn't work. Why do you think Ted Cruz' conservative republican colleagues hate him? He's actually hurting their cause, not helping it with his scorched-earth stance.

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The result of compromising by the way. So the method you prefer has lead to the outcome you don't like.

In the same post you're quoting, Lansbury went on to describe a perspective from which ACA is a really good thing...

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This conversation is super interesting given that I was in fear of being roasted on twitter/here for holding a world view roughly similar to Vader/Mangela.

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The result of compromising by the way. So the method you prefer has lead to the outcome you don't like.

I'm really not even sure what you're disagreeing with here. Like, who says that compromise is a bad thing? What's preferable -- utter gridlock in Washington? A government where everyone refuses to give even an inch, so the government shuts down and never reopens because nobody has the exact same viewpoint? The thing that you're advocating for is basically Trumpism -- don't back down, and don't give in to demands. You're the best guy with the best ideas, so get them into play at all costs. It's just not how the world works.

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I'm personally not a huge fan of the Clintons at this point, but yeah, laying blame on them for DADT is a big misunderstanding of the problem.

 

Bill Clinton wanted to just outright remove the prohibition on homosexuals in the military full stop, and it was going to be within his power as the President to do so as the prohibition was just a part of the armed services regulations, which would be within Clinton's purview to alter.  When Clinton took office, he had opposition within his own party to doing that, and Congress began looking at taking the existing provision and codifying it in law, removing Clinton's ability to undo the ban.  DADT was the compromise that came from negotiations with the people who wanted to codify that bit of bigotry.

 

The changes were going to be added to the yearly must-pass Defense Authorization bill.  This is a favored pressure tactic because the defense authorization is the appropriations bill that funds the armed forces.  Any time someone wants to do something involving the armed forces that would encounter pushback from the other half of Congress or from the President, you tie it into the Defense Authorization and then club them over the head with "They tried to stop Our Good Military Men And Women from getting paid!" if they act to block it.

 

DADT was basically Clinton wringing every last bit of compromise he could get out of a situation that could have very easily could have just been Congress taking the power to remove the ban out of the President's hands and retaining every last bit of the existing prohibition.

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Hillary made a similar argument about DOMA recently. She said it was passed (from many Dems perspectives) to short term stop a constitutional amendment that would have prevented marriage rights nation wide, and to preserve the ability of individual states to allow marriage rights even if the climate for that wasn't good nationally (a more draconian law could have stopped marriages in places like Massachusetts).

I could see this as either being a bit of politically convenient revisionism or being the outlook she and Bill actually had at the time, it's hard to know. The point is that it's much better to look at the telos of someone's career than individual actions. This will better indicate what they might do when they actually have the power to do it (see also the fact that Lyndon Johnson fought like hell, way harder than Kennedy, for three sweeping civil rights bills as President when as a senator the Texas political climate prevented him from doing much of anything on that front)

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Sanders won the "global primary" (Americans living abroad) by a colossal margin. He had 69% of the vote. Unfortunately thanks to the "Super delegate" shit the Democrats have, they're siding with Clinton because hooray for hijacking democracy.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/2016-primary-democrats-abroad-vote-221040

 

In Donald Trump news, last night John Oliver tackled the wall idea as a legit issue to help demonstrate how absurd it is even when taken seriously.

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Sanders won the "global primary" (Americans living abroad) by a colossal margin. He had 69% of the vote. Unfortunately thanks to the "Super delegate" shit the Democrats have, they're siding with Clinton because hooray for hijacking democracy.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/2016-primary-democrats-abroad-vote-221040

 

Luckily, superdelegates often change their minds if the person they initially supported is losing national support. The current superdelegate count is how people intend to vote, not how they necessarily will. See Obama in 2012  B)

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It rates both. If you go to their pages it lists their statements by category and if you click any category it lists the statements within the category.

 

Also, to clarify my personal position, I actually generally prefer Bernie: I think Hillary is basically just a politician who does all the things a politician does, and a vote for her is a vote for the status quo. That said, I certainly think it's worthwhile questioning the narratives that get spun around her, both positive and negative. I'm actually glad you posted the info challenging the perhaps unearned positive image of her, but I think it's also important to challenge the criticisms of her that are, perhaps, specious, ie dishonest, shouty, etc. Not trying to endorse anyone here, just trying to establish an honest and straightforward discourse.

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But what I'm saying is, if I call someone a poopie head thief, that has no bearing on that person's honesty.

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Yes, but the statements made by the other people aren't the ones that are getting categorized on those pages. Click through to the statements and they're all direct quotes or paraphrases.

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Yeah, they tag politicians in stories that may include someone saying something about them, but they filter those out for statistical analysis when considering an individual candidate's historical truthfulness. 

 

That said, it can be an interesting thing to take a look at how often someone is lied about.  It's fascinating to see how little of a relationship with facts that some famous blowhards have.  I mean, we already know that, but seeing laid out brings some more starkness to it.

 

 

However, one thing that does bug me about that article defending Hilary is that it lumps in "half true" statements with the positives, and I don't believe a half-truth has any value, as the best lies often weave facts and truth in with the bullshit and that such a category should be considered on the "false" side for analysis.  That's me though.  When I saw someone post this same article earlier today, they followed up with a graph that actually shows a breakdown of each category, and it wouldn't really change the articles argument about Hilary or Bernie if that category was moved. 

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I think that in a colloquial sense we usually mean half-true to mean intentionally true but misleading, whereas in this case they just mean fundamentally incomplete. I don't think half-truths are as much an indication of weasellyness in these ratings as they're generally associated, where most of what we'd consider "half-truths" would probably be filed under 'mostly false'.

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Nevermind I just realized they have a counter next to the percentages. What the -fuck-. They only have 75 statements to rate Sanders compared to 174 statements for Clinton. Not aiming for an equal sample size really screws all this up, and now begs the question, what statements for Sanders are not being included.

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PolitiFact rates the truthiness of contentious statements being reported in the media. Take that as you will.

Also, from what I understand from when I used to follow PolitiFact, "mostly true" means that someone said something that was true, but it was decontextualized in a way that may be misleading, but the decontextualization mostly impacted the nuance of the statement, not the core.

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Hillary has been in the spotlight a lot longer, it's really 0% surprising or indicative of anything underhanded that more of her statements have been examined closely

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I think that in a colloquial sense we usually mean half-true to mean intentionally true but misleading, whereas in this case they just mean fundamentally incomplete. I don't think half-truths are as much an indication of weasellyness in these ratings as they're generally associated, where most of what we'd consider "half-truths" would probably be filed under 'mostly false'.

 

You might be right, I haven't taken a look at their criteria or honestly even read the entirety of an entry for quite awhile.  I'm the worst, I just trust that their rating is probably right. 

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