Zaktor @ Zaktor @sopuli.xyz

Posts

12

Comments

3,421

Joined

2 yr. ago

Lol, sure man. Definitely no one ever makes an argument in an editorial. It's not possible as their opponent is not present, may not even read it, and frequently will not be allowed to publish a rebuttal to the same audience.

Arguments are about the audience, not the opponent. Making a straw man when your opponent is not present is the most common form of the fallacy. When they're there they might just say that's not what they're argument is.

Lol, what? Do you seriously think you cannot create a straw man argument in anything but direct debate? Sure Mr. Smartman.

Hint, logical fallacies are about the logic, not the debate.

Just because you feel like the straw men deserve it doesn't change that you're arguing with hypotheticals versions you've created instead of actual people.

You've literally defined the argument of an opposing group to look stupid so you can dunk on them. You're arguing with a straw man. This isn't even a critique of your rhetorical basis though, it's just normal Internet lameness.

The swing voters and the non-swing but intermittent voters will just take gut checks about how their life is going and figure out which side wants that to change. Each side, when they're up for change, will pretend their chosen policies will fix everything, and enough people don't really have the wherewithal to recognize whether it's actually going to do anything.

The truth is, for both sides, usually it won't, because even the good stuff is usually tinkering on the long term or hoping that business subsidies trickle down to regular people. Before Trump mostly nothing happened to really impact people's lives, and Trump's stuff is all terrible. So the same stresses that prompted them to believe the other guy's changes would finally do something are still there and they're now looking for a new lie to believe in.

Cato probably agrees with that statement, but at least they have some actual principles about small government rather than small government for good things and big government for bad things.

Two states allocate votes by congressional district, but that's just first past the post at a smaller level and the spoiler issue remains. You need proportional representation or some actual form of transferable vote to avoid it.

It feels like this slogan is only repeated in left spaces, which then feels like a leftist version of centrists throwing trans people under the bus to chase conservatives. The people who are the primary purveyors of petty hate need to be the priority for the message before anyone on the left is going to feel like preaching tolerance for intolerance is anything but a way to smuggle bigotry into left political spaces.

I don't like neoliberals, but my comment only referenced them because you defined Obama as neoliberal when his first campaign was very much not. That's what people voted for. And of the elections after that, the only one that couldn't be easily described as based on "change" was Obama's second term against Romney, who is himself sort of the antithesis of change.

It's a very American viewpoint to believe that sentiments just spring up organically with no influence from political leaders and their role in the whole process is to take opinion polls and only then decide what they believe.

Taking away the microphones of hate-mongers doesn't make hate cease to exist, but it pushes it back into the shadows and cuts off an avenue for it to breed. The US would be a less hateful and less fascist place if Donald Trump was in prison. Leaders can drive the conversation and mainstream fringe ideas. The Democratic establishment just chooses not to.

Yes, that's exactly what they're talking about and you're being extremely weird in making it a priority of discussion on something at best tangentially related.

It's just a straw man writ large because you're miffed at another online argument you had somewhere else.

All the fucking second-order sexists here saying we can't elect a woman because two of the worst female candidates ever lost.

These are the same people who said Obama couldn't win because he was black. Not that they were racist, no they love black people, but they just want to make absolutely extra sure we don't actually try to elect one. Because they imagine their neighbor/uncle/coworker would look at everything going on and think "none of that is important, no black presidents". They're not racist, they just advocate for racism. And with this most facile of analyses they'll believe themselves to be politically savvy realists rather than reactionary children.

This is the cowardice that dooms liberalism. At every opportunity they want to worry about what their opponents will like and time after time will try to blame strategy or immutable characteristics for the failures of their do-nothing policies. Politics is about change. When people's lives suck you don't try to tell them we'll keep doing the same things. And whether the person talking change is a charismatic black man or a clown show, or even... A FEEEMALE, they'll vote for them.

Obama ran on Change, closing Gitmo, and universal healthcare. That he governed as a neoliberal scared to change anything doesn't change what people actual voted for.

Electors are not granted proportionally. If the Democratic nominee gets 30% of the vote in a state, AOC gets 30% of the vote, and the Republican gets 35% of the vote, all the electors are Republican.

We absolutely don't know anything of the sort. Centrist assholes just cling to that excuse to avoid acknowledging that focusing on appealing to conservatives and pledging to maintain the status quo is a failure.

This piece seems premised on the idea that better campaign tactics would have won the race for a guy that resigned in disgrace and didn't live in the city. Maybe the problem was just him and his shitty insider politics.

New Zealand recently just punished three politicians harshly for doing the Haka. They were protesting a proposed law to strip special constitutional privileges for the Maori stemming from the original colonial treaties. Those old British colonizers were apparently too respectful to the rights of the indigenous people for modern conservatives.

How come our centrists become household names for all the times they fuck the party over while their's are people I've never heard of before?

And this is the issue that was worth having a meltdown over. Not any of the kidnapping, not Trump's tariffs and market manipulation, not Adams' corruption or Cuomo's COVID scandals. Their utter silence on everything else makes their current freak out transparently hollow. None of them are worried about NYC, they're worried about the idea of the uberwealthy getting taxed to make life better for everyone else catching on.

Yes, but you're talking about the current taxes. Is there a law saying they can't institute additional taxes themselves? Because the proposed tax is an entirely separate thing and unless that's precluded by law the existing tax doesn't really matter. Adams had to go through the state because he wanted to reduce the existing tax.