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[SUSAN CRUSHBONE]

I strongly disagree with the meme on here that Cruz is a weak candidate. He's definitely a frontrunner for the nomination. He's very intelligent and a strong debater, and he knows exactly what to say to get the hillbilly fascists that make up the Republican base hoot and holler in ecstasy.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

once again… it's really easy to say "identity politics" is a plague when your identity isn't constantly under attack.

[TDAS04]

Do Nazi's still like Wagner?

I wonder what Hitler would say if heard Nazi metal though. Lol

[IceSpear]

Hillary will make a great president.

[H. Ross Peron]

#Sandersat5
#Sandersmentum
#HillaryJustBarelyAbove50
#2008Redux!!!!!
#DraftWarren
#DemsHateHillary
#NoHomeStateAdvantage

[RFayette]

Admittedly the lawyer who filed this has his PO box a few blocks from my high school.

[Goldwater]

Dubai easily

[Maxwell]

Never thought I'd say this but... Hell is too damn cold.

Indeed. Hell will freez-... I mean, pigs will fly before I go there...

[Antonio the Sixth]

Defend pragmatic Republican swing-state Senators at all costs.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

I enjoy deprecating my own ideological inclination.

That's news to me. Positive news, mind you.

[JerryArkansas]

Haley would be my guess. Walker or Pence would be solid picks too.  Cruz won't pick a moderate running mate. His biggest selling point to conservatives is ideological purity.  Huntsman, Ayotte, etc. wouldn't be considered.

The base always rallies around the nominee. Romney didn't lose 2012 because the conservatives stayed home. They won't care about the VP nominee so long as Cruz tops the ticket. Cruz is running because he wants to win, not for sh*ts and giggles.

Of course he is running to win. You think Cruz/Huntsman would be stronger than Cruz/Walker? Nobody outside of Atlas believes Huntsman belongs anywhere near a GOP ticket. He doesn't connect with voters and his smugness is borderline obnoxious. And he clearly despises the base. Haley is the most likely, because she's charismatic, a governor, a woman, a minority, conservative and term limited.

You accuse me of being part of the "Atlas bubble" but I find that you are the one stuck in the Tea Party bubble of electoral ignorance. What about the corruption and ethics issues surrounding Nikki Haley? Just because she is "young and charismatic" doesn't mean she will be anywhere near the ticket. Come the general election, we Republicans no longer count. We can unite around the nominee and win, or we can stay home and lose. There are no other options. Outreach to independents is crucial, and a John Kasich/Jon Huntsman/Rob Portman type is what the party needs.

[Türkisblau]

Well, guess what guys, I'm a Democrat. 

Congratulations!!! Have you come out to your family yet? If they're accepting, would you bring a Democrat home? If they're not, just remember: you were born this way, this wasn't a choice you made. So happy for you!!

No, I haven't, but I know my dad will support me through this.  And I will most definitely be bringing a democrat home for christmas this year.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Absolute HP. I hate the establishment GOP almost as much as I hate the Tea Party.

[BaconBacon96]

Stringent and comprehensive regulations of political parties and the media can effectively neuter the influence of money in politics. Of course, their implementation would have to be carefully watched, but this is not an impossible task. Many countries, while not perfect, do a far better job than the United States in this regards. I would go much further, of course (ban all private donations to political parties, have the State entirely fund electoral campaigns), but regardless, it's pretty ludicrous to claim that the American situation is an inevitable product of capitalism.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

RIP FF.

[Maxwell]

Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics,
Great Russia has welded forever to stand.
Created in struggle by will of the people,
United and mighty, our Soviet land!

Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!

Through tempests the sunrays of freedom have cheered us,
Along the new path where great Lenin did lead.
To a righteous cause he raised up the peoples,
Inspired them to labour and valourous deed.

Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!

In the victory of Communism's immortal ideal,
We see the future of our dear land.
And to her fluttering scarlet banner,
Selflessly true we always shall stand!

Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!

[Mr. Smith]

pool full of liqour. dive in it.

(Sorry for not being helpful, that's just how I deal with these things)

[Antonio the Sixth]

Given that Darwin, Newton, Faraday, Galileo, and those of Abassad Caliphate were all great scientists, I'll go with yes.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Sorry for attention whoring yet again, but I thought this was worth a formal announcement. Starting tomorrow, I will be taking a one-month break from the forum.

[Sumner 1868]

Way too many articles from right wings = OMGZ HE'Z MUZLIM THAT'S ANSWERS IT !!!!111

[traininthedistance]

Knowing the media, they'll obsess over a specific region or demographic (probably Hispanics) and portray it as the Eternal Irreversible Future.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Most movements don't actually consider the human costs of disruption of norms on actual living, breathing people, for whom such disruptions are not statistical aberrations but real crises with real consequences. Inaction is always easy to measure and quantify, action is trickier to justify or examine because those policies have not yet actually been instituted.

There's the kernel of a good cautionary tale in the first sentence here, but the rest goes deeply off the rails super fast.  Like, seriously, the idea that people are good at measuring and quantifying the costs of inaction just flies so directly in the face of every piece of evidence we have.  I mean, yes, of course "action for action's sake" is not something we should do.  But I'm quite confident that's not the problem we have right now, and behaving as if it is overcorrects us into absurdity.

To take one example, it is easy to call for "saner" environmental policies,

Ooh, good example.

but to what degree can we be sure that the (real) harm caused to future generations by climate changes outweighs the (equally real and immediate) harm to those whose livelihoods are dependent on producing coal, oil, and natural gas,

Okay, what about the real and immediate harm our current system has on people who get asthma and cancer from particulate pollution, or lose their water supply due to fracking, or are already getting hit with desertification, aquifer loss, more and stronger floods, etc? This isn't just some future-generation thing, even by your ludicrous standards there ought to be justification for some action seeing as there are victims already.  Unless of course victims of the status quo don't count as real victims in your mind.

or to the massive costs needed to renovate the power grid,

You think infrastructure lasts forever?  We'd need to renovate that sh*t sooner or later anyway, you don't get to count that as an extra cost.  And, anyway, there are a lot of investments that would pay for themselves over a pretty quick timeframe anyway, but for whatever reason (inertia, lack of upfront capital, bureaucratic obstacles) don't get built.  I mean, do you seriously think that there are no such worthy investments to be made? Not even just w/r/t the power grid, but in general?

or to the extra expense of transportation to those struggling to get by as is?

Oh, god, really? This disingenuous rot? Protip: those people who are actually most struggling to get by wouldn't see their transportation costs rise under a sane enviro policy.  To make that claim requires both a stunning ignorance of a) the reality for millions of people, and b) the actual sorts of solutions that are being offered on this point.

Also, BTW, our transportation system as currently designed is quite literally a grisly horror show. People getting maimed and killed trying to cross the street is a real crisis with real consequences.  But that's just the way it is, so those victims don't count, amirite?

(One of these days I need to start a thread about the invention of jaywalking, BTW– which is an underrated and forgotten case of societal change being harmfully thrust on people in exactly the way you bemoan.  Let's be perfectly clear– some changes are bad, and I'm happy to decry them when they should be decried. But I guess in your mind, it's been made, we shouldn't fix it, too late no backsies?)

We cannot quantify the harm of inaction over the next century, so how do we know the consequences of global climate change then outweigh the costs of action now?

[citation needed]

If you want to say that we cannot pinpoint things to the dollar and cent, sure.  But we can– and do– have enough evidence to make a reasonable, and overwhelmingly compelling, guess.  The plausible range might be wide but even on the lowest end of impacts/costs there are a lot of things we'd need to do. (And, of course, wouldn't a healthy risk-averse conservativism behave as if to prepare for the worst-case scenario?)  I mean, I guess you can be a radical skeptic if you so wish, but at a certain point I have to wonder how you square that with the existence of industrial and post-industrial technology in the world today.

Either that, or you're engaging in the most sharply sloping time discounting I've ever seen, basically to the point where future generations hold no moral weight in your calculus.  But, of course, there are people alive today who are those future generations.  Apres moi, le deluge?

This bias of action or just doing something to look like you're doing something over the alternative solution of actually weighing whether the consequences of inaction outweigh the consequences of action is very distasteful.

Again, no such bias actually exists!  You've given me exactly zero indication that you take the "consequences of inaction" seriously– or that people in general take it seriously.

Of course the well-being of people can be improved by the efforts of other people. I'm distrustful of any attempts to do that on a systematic level. You improve people's lives by covering for your coworker when she goes to take her kids to the doctor or by volunteering at your local food bank. That doesn't make the world a better place, though. The world is neither good nor bad, the world simply is. You can make other people's lives more pleasant and your own more pleasant by extension, though.

Again, what counts as "systematic"?  Was the New Deal too "systematic" for you?  What about the introduction of an income tax?  Or the Voting Rights Act?  Fighting Jim Crow was a pretty systematic societal change, now wasn't it.  Freeing the slaves, now that was a shake-up, pity the poor plantation owners being disrupted.  Are you saying that anything worth doing, is worth doing solely through small-scale private charity?  Are we floating in a sort of timeless jelly where past actions have no impact on the present, where present actions have no impact on the future?

Look, I'm not saying that you should have to view the world as "good or bad".  I'm certainly not saying that human civilization has an inherent teleology, that "the arc of history bends toward justice" (Though I will admit that MLK's quote, while not necessarily accurate, is useful for those of us who give a sh*t about trying to keep it from bending toward injustice.)  I'm not saying you have to believe anything. 

I am merely saying that you should acknowledge that the observable universe seems to obey predictable laws.  And that we can draw inferences from those laws, and act accordingly. In short, as Gully said that there is such a thing as evidence, and sometimes the evidence really does say, loud and clear, that action is necessary.

(I'd quote it in the GPG if I hadn't already shown my partiality with regard to that discussion)

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

No (literally normal)

[Thunderbird is the word]

Your strawman is on fire, but I don't feel fond enough about you to bother putting it out. So you can just keep burning out in the cornfield.
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[JerryArkansas]

Okay sorry I'm done.