The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

It's amusing that jfern believes the 2004 election was rigged and yet dismisses the russian scandal as a kooky conspiracy theory

It's amazing that jfern has 40k+ posts on this forum and yet manages to be one of the most useless posters here

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

It's amusing that jfern believes the 2004 election was rigged and yet dismisses the russian scandal as a kooky conspiracy theory

It's amazing that jfern has 40k+ posts on this forum and yet manages to be one of the most useless posters here

This belongs in the sulfur mine, not here.

[White Trash]

Kamala Harris has done more for the justice of million Californians, the most racially diverse state in the country, then Bernie Sanders has done for his sh**tty rural white state. Yet it's the old mediocre white guy that is being shoved down the base throat, when Kamala is a inspiration to many WOC who feel the pain of living in Trump America. Explain to me how the low accomplished senator gets a fair shot at the presidency and not the hard-working GA.

As for winning over voters, I think the blue collar dotards are lost for good. Whatever sacrifice they've earned has been lost be embracing the toxicity of Donald Trump. The party ought to push double down on the key demographics that support Democrats, such as women of color, who are the highest turnout demographic of all ethnic groups in the country. Most young blue collar white women can be won over by Kamala platform, even with young blue collar men being just as reactionary as their Fox News watching papa. Moderates who are discomfort with the far-right and far-left can be inspired to cast a vote for the sensible California senator, who won't make you lose your sleep at night. 


I couldn't think of a better nominee who would inspired the base to come out to the polling stations.

You are literally a fucking moron if you think that young blue collar men are all conservative "muh American" Republicans. Here in New England young white men vote mainly Democratic (Especially the Irish). As a matter of fact as you climb up the economic ladder, you will find that it is those sensible "moderate" upper middle-class whites who aren't very blue collar at all, that are responsible for the loss of your precious Maddam Secretary last November. I am well aware that this is one of the most liberal regions of the nation, however it wasn't too long ago that Democrats were able to win blue collar voters in Appalachian States as well as in the rust belt. You talk about doubling down on minority demographics which is all well and good, but what seems to be too much for your thick skull to comprehend is that there are not nearly enough minority votes out there by themselves to win elections. 2016 proved that. You also seem to forget that the economic issues that are plaguing those blue collar "dotards" also plague people of color. What is Kamala Harris going to do about healthcare or wealth inequality? Also, as someone who seems not to care about the lives of people who have hoped to serve the minimum time required, and instead pushes for longer sentences, how do you think people of color feel about that? People of color in America have long been fed the line about law and order, and from what I gather aren't all that convinced that said law and order is being applied evenly or fairly.

But please, be my guest. Continue to divide the "good people" and "those people" by class and race, just like the GOP, and see how far it gets you.

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

I reject the premise of this question. There is no way to post on this site that can be considered productive.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

When are Democrats ever not worried about something? Talk about overreaction. The Republican Party was subject to a hostile takeover last year and they constantly have competitive, divisive, expensive primaries (occasionally even in swing states and blue states!) Clearly that's really taking a toll on them politically.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Several observations:

1.  Florida's Turnpike was renamed the Ronald Reagan Turnpike while Reagan was still alive. 

2.  Reagan National Airport was name for Ronald Reagan in 1998, while he was still alive.

3.  MLK's name is on lots of thing, and naming a school after MLK is sort of a way of saying to black folks that we can't think of any other blacks worthy of this kind of honor. 

4.  Jefferson Davis had many admirable qualities, and I don't judge him by today's standards.  But Jefferson Davis did more to revive the idea of the "Lost Cause" than most of the folks whose statues are under siege today.  If you read James Swanson's Bloody Crimes (a book primarily about the hunt to capture John Wilkes Booth and Jefferson Davis), it tells of Davis's speaking tours and engagements in which he eulogized the Confederate Dead.  Indeed, "the Confederate Dead" became Davis's mission in later life.  There was an element of healing in this; families had lost members at young ages, and Davis's presentations, I am sure, helped many grieving family members come to believe that their loved ones died for something bigger than themselves.  But in doing so, Davis also, consciously and deliberately, sowed the seeds of separate Southern nationhood, speaking of how, someday, the South would rise again.  Davis was not a cruel taskmaster, but he was a slaveowner, and he was a racist.  Moreover, Davis was unrepentant on the issue of Southern slavery, even as that land of liberty, Russia, was abolishing serfdom around the time we were having a Civil War. 

5.  Folks have the right to choose their own heroes.  There are, in the telling of history, false narratives galore, but there is no logical reason why Mississippi blacks should want to honor Jefforson Davis that I can think of.  Predominantly white communities exercise local control over their street-naming, school-naming, etc.  It shouldn't be remarkable that black communities do the same thing.

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

I would like some of the more "progressive" posters on this forum to realize that criticizing Bernie Sanders does not make one a brainless Hillary bot.

Also labeling anyone who disagrees with you on giving away everything for free as a right-wing Wall Street shill is not going to win you a nationwide election.

This is one of the major complaints I had with a lot of the Bernie supporters I knew, and a little bit with Bernie himself. I agreed with some (but certainly not all) of parts of his platform, and thought seriously about voting for him on Super Tuesday, but I decided at the end of the day that he wouldn't be an effective force for enacting well thought-out policy. I have some progressive tendencies but I also really value pragmatism. The thing that bothered me about die-hard Bernie supporters was they equated people who valued pragmatism, the rigorous critique of policy and appreciation of nuance with being ideologically opposed to them. Combine this antagonism with the incredible sense of self-righteous moral superiority that a lot of liberals have and it makes them really unpleasant to talk with sometimes (yes, I recognize that there are a lot of Clinton supporters who are also self-righteous and combative so spare me your "both sides do it!"). I would have much more faith in a Liz Warren-type Democrat as President than Bernie, but because I criticized Bernie for being really unrealistic, I got labelled by a lot of Bernie supporters I knew (including good friends) as a DINO, enemy of the working class, neoliberal shill, etc. And by the tenth time I got one of those comments it really got to me I started to get combative.

[bagelman]

Ah yes, because I don’t support the first universal healthcare bill that took 12 minutes to write, it immediately means that I support the current system.

Sorry about your dad, by the way. It must be hard to lose a family member so young. I have quite a lot of friends who are struggling to get healthcare, and I would share their stories, but I wouldn’t like to use them as political props.....

That’s just low, deranged, and twisted on so many levels. You oughta be ashamed for using him as a prop.

I could address many of the silly points made in this thread (especially the "rationing!!!" one which ehh happens in literally every model of healthcare to some extent no matter the structure: only that the American model where it is based on ones ability to pay is by far the worst) but this one strikes me as being the worst: the idea that you can't use your own personal experiences with a broken and terrible system to argue for change because "you're politicising them!!!" or whatever is a terrible idea.  Unless you're wiling to argue the same about people who used similar experiences to argue for a whole array of very important regulations that everyone generally agrees are good today - things like mandating basic safety features like airbags and seat belts in cars, and other similar safety related things that benefit everyone in our day to day life.

I think also this thread shows a significant misunderstanding of the point of private members bills (of which this really is an American equivalent of, in that its not introduced by the majority and will not go very far through the legislative process) and why people introduce legislation that has an incredibly low if not zero chance of passing.  Its not about presenting an entirely perfect bill and seriously trying to pass the thing: its about keeping an issue or cause that you believe in alive and actively debated rather than letting it die - this is precisely why the Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare 629 times when Obama was President: they never actually expected the thing to become law but wanted the issue to remain in the news and not allow it to become settled which seemed to work.  The problem with this approach is that when you do get in a position to pass whatever you want you actually need to put something workable together and that can prove problematic - to carry on my earlier analogy, look at the issues that the Republicans had passing anything on healthcare when they had the ability to pass practically anything they wanted.  The difference between those advocating for a better, single-payer (or multi-payer as well: both models seem to be considered as the same thing in America at the moment) system have at least a vague idea of the sort of system that they want: while Republicans apparently put little to no thought in the system that they wanted to introduce after repealing the ACA.  In that respect Sanders has done exactly what he intended to do with this thing - indeed, this thread is proof of that!

In terms of the article itself: its primary points (other than ageist insults and electoral concerns) seem to be based on one main point - that single-payer proposals did not pass at the state level.  However there are plenty of reasons why single-payer systems would be untenable at state level - especially in smaller states like Vermont and Colorado where they got the most consideration - and that's because its only a model that sensibly works at a national level.  Universal coverage requires costs to fall (American healthcare spending being significantly higher than any other country in the world is untenable: especially since performance in the US under the current system continue to be amongst the worst in a group of similar nations - incidentally the highest performing country overall is the UK and its Beveridge-based state-managed system, although Australia's single payer insurance system is second and the Netherlands multi-payer private system is third which would suggest to me that there's no single perfect model) and that requires nation-wide organisation since healthcare, like everything, is an economy of scale and a single federal system would be able to negotiate significantly lower costs than, say, Vermont would by itself.  The author of that article does not even consider that fact: nor is the fact that although taxation would need to rise in order to fund a single-payer system, this would be balanced by individuals needing to pay significantly lower if any premiums in order to get healthcare coverage: which would likely balance out for a significant number of people.  The other concern of the article seems to be "we need to be talking about other issues!!" which isn't really worth taking that seriously: a party can and needs to talk about a large range of issues.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Yeah, the history of the Black vote seems to be oversimplified a lot or just flat out mistold.  Most historical accounts show the relationship between the GOP and the Black community already becoming pretty shaky by the early 20th Century (despite historic revisionism, many 19th Century Democrats DID charge the GOP of the time as being corporatist and overly business-friendly, and this was eventually going to be something at odds with a recently freed Black population), and by the 1920s, it was ripe for the taking.  Many Democrats in the North actually made pretty strong appeals to the Black community in local elections or during campaign stops/speeches/events in the North (while, of course, playing to the desires of Southern Democrats elsewhere) throughout most of the early 1900s.  By 1932, Hoover was winning the Black vote the same way that Obama won Elliot County, KY, IMO ... by 1936, with the NAACP endorsement, FDR had it in the bag.  Blacks becoming a Democratic voting bloc wasn't as "sudden" of a switch as the actual numbers seem to dictate, in that there was a TON of tension between the Black community and the GOP well before the Great Depression.  By the time Eisenhower was running, most quotes and interviews of Black leaders of the time seem to give off the attitude of, "all you guys run on is being the 'Party of Lincoln' and warning that a vote for any Democrat is a vote for Southern segregationists getting more committe power, and frankly it's less compelling than the message we're getting from Northern Democrats."

I'd say by 1942/1944 at the absolute latest (you could argue that Black support for FDR in 1936 and 1940 might have just been because he was winning so handily), a majority of Black Americans no longer saw the Democrats as any more hostile to their interests than the GOP, even if they were hostile in totally different ways.  Blacks have always been said to be some of the most pragmatic voters in the US, and they made a pretty rational decision that a Northern Democrat who focused on economic initiatives that helped poorer Black communities but was all buddy-buddy with the Dixiecrats was actually a better deal than a pro-business Republican whose constituents were almost entirely White suburbanites and White Northern rural voters and talked about Reconstruction all the time.

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

To which my response is "no sh*t, sherlock."

Sanders' bill is unworkable in its current form. And I don't trust Democrats to have a workable version when they regain power because the GOP has been crying repeal and replace for 7 years only to not have anything workable.

We have three options. We could ignore healthcare entirely (something I don't agree with but I do think next time we regain power it should be lower on the bucket list than immigration, criminal justice reform, and infrastructure) we could tweak the Sanders bill while we still can so that it isn't horrendous, or we could look elsewhere. There are other members of Congress with decent plans, either standalone or as a path to an eventual workable single-payer. Brown has medicare buy-in, Kaine and Bennett have their Medicare X bill, Conyers has AmeriCare, and so on.

Is Sanders' bill garbage? Yes. Is the idea of single-payer bad? Absolutely not. But we should under no circumstances let this particular bill become law.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

I honestly can't believe this needs to be stated, but really shouldn't be surprised.

Victims are never at fault. Sexual assault and sexual violence of any kind never were, never are, and never could be excused, rationalized, defended, or downplayed in their severity. Anyone who has committed any sexual transgression against another person deserves to be called out for it, no matter their age or position in society. Victims deserve to be believed by people unless/until the accused is proven innocent (which they rarely are innocent, considering a mere 2-8% of such accusations are false). Sexual assaulters and rapists very rarely ever face any serious consequences for their actions and throughout history, even today in our country, victims are made to feel ashamed and at fault when they did nothing wrong whatsoever. Blame is 100% on the perpertrator; they consciously chose to touch, force themselves upon, or make unwanted sexual comments towards another person without their consent.

If you in any way, shape, or form try to disregard a victim's testimony, downplay the severity of what had happened to them, blame them for it, or question their actions whatsoever, you are a horrible person. That's what's meant by the pervasiveness of rape culture in America. Sexual violence is an incredibly serious and far too common thing in our society; millions of people are permanently scarred by something they did nothing to cause. It can lead to depression, self-harm, PTSD, and countless other problems in a victim's life and the last thing they need is to be shamed by others. And if you think "oh it was just innocent touching," then you're trash.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Surely a pretty key part of being left wing would be trying to understand why someone would have come to a place in their life where they had given up trying to find work?

I mean, in any case, it is quite funny that all of the people who "yack yack yack welfare scroungers" and all that just so happens to know a plethora of people who just want to not work and live off the dole or whatever.

I'm privileged af, but I come from a pretty small town, and I know enough people from all sorts of class backgrounds, from the proverbial WWC son of a bus driver to the kids of Moroccan immigrants; and I can tell you that none of them wants to just waste their life away on unemployment benefits. People just aren't like that, unless something that has happened to them that would make them give up.

It's quite important, you know, to treat people with dignity. Especially in an economic and social model that we live in these days that basically doesn't give a crap about you unless you meet the right set of criteria to "succeed".

[Kingpoleon]

I knew all of the Presidents in order when I was 6 years old.  That was in 1963.  I also learned that year that 3 of our Presidents were assassinated.  About 6 months after learning that, JFK was assassinated.  I remember not seeing this as a remarkable event, but as something that happens to Presidents over the course of time.  I knew Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, that the Republicans were the party against slavery, and that he was a great man.  I knew that JFK was a Democrat, and that "we" (my mother, father and grandmother) were Democrats.  Lincoln was my hero as a little kid, but "ending slavery" was the only thing I really understood Lincoln did.

LBJ was the first President I remembered in the sense that I understood what he was doing in office.  My parents were the kind of anti-Communist liberals that made up the Democratic Party.  I remembered that LBJ signed laws that would make the lives of black folks fairer, and that was a good thing.  (I grew up in Long Island, not in the South.)  But I also knew that LBJ was doing what he needed to do to keep us protected from the Communists in Vietnam that would take our freedom away if they could.

I really looked up to LBJ.  When I was 10 and 11, I came to know more of what was going on, and I didn't understand why hippies and such were demonstrating against our country, rooting for our troops to lose.  And I remember news clips where people in Congress were criticizing LBJ on the war. I didn't know who they were or what they were doing, but it looked as if they were cowards, too afraid to protect "us".  Gradually, I came to view LBJ as the only man in Washington who would be strong on our behalf.  When I heard on March, 31, 1968 that LBJ opted out of running again, I felt scared; the only President with stones was packing it in.  (Such was my thought process at age 10 and 11.)

Four (4) months after LBJ packed it in, my Uncle Tom (my late father's brother) came to visit.  There was a political discussion, and he explained that the Vietnam War was undeclared and we had no business being there.  I forget his reasoning, but my mother and grandmother were convinced, and I thought I'd been had.  We're getting all of these folks killed for nothing?  LBJ came off his pedestal and never went back on it for several years.  By this time, I was a pretty confirmed Democrat.  (Research shows that party identification often begins as early as 6 years old; my childhood friends pretty much knew thy were Republicans in my Republican home town.)  There was redemption, in my mind, for LBJ.  He grew his hair long (as I did) in retirement, and I thought this super cool, given how much grief he got from hippies.  As LBJ died less than 4 years after leaving office, all of my impressions of him occurred before I was an adult. 

More importantly, LBJ was the force in the Establishment that rammed through the Civil Rights bills of the 1960s.  This was redemptive in my eyes.  I'm old enough to have seen, live on TV, black folks demonstrating for the right to vote on TV, and, to quote Mike Royko, "the worst elements of Southern Beer-Belly Manhood (being) allowed to provide the response".  I knew LBJ was from Texas, and that Texas was a slave state, so this was even more redemptive; he did what was right at the expense of the approval of his own people.  That took guts, and I knew that, even as a kid.

I will share this memory as well:  I grew up in a liberal Democratic household, where my parents voted for LBJ in 1964 for President and Nelson Rockefeller in 1966 for Governor of NY.  My best friend's dad was a founding father of New York's Conservative Party; they supported Goldwater in 1964 and Paul Adams, the Conservative Party's nominee for Governor in 1966.  (Nelson Rockefeller was the whole reason the Conservative Party was formed; to bring the GOP in line with conservatism in NY State.)  Yet I NEVER saw folks vilify those who voted for the opposition the way I have seen in the new millenium.  I NEVER saw ordinary Republicans react to LBJ the way Republicans of this era reacted to Obama, and I NEVER say ordinary Democrats react to Nixon the way Democrats today react to Trump, or even to Bush 43.  People were more mature back then; they didn't root for the country to lose in order that their party can win.  Sadly, I can't say that of today's electorate. 

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

Supporting an immoral ideology is a grave moral failing. To claim otherwise means to be fundamentally unserious about one's political beliefs.

Of course, everyone has their moral failings and we shouldn't be too quick to judge people for them, but I thought "terrible person" was pretty widely accepted forum hyperbole for someone who does something that's clearly bad and is unrepentant about it.

[IceSpear]

Tribalism taps into very powerful instincts of human psychology. Once a person successfully weaves themselves into the mentality of a group and acts as their ideological validator and emotional surrogate, their followers will be inclined to attach their own identities to said leader and hold them up as a superhuman icon free from any of the follies the rest of us are prone to. The emotional investment we put in those we look up to is intense and we make them a part of ourselves; people have deeply ingrained incentives to overlook all sorts of flaws present in the authorities figures within the tribe since it might force the tribe to question its own integrity if the models it holds up as their exemplified virtues turn out to be less perfect than believed.

We are social creatures at heart; all things good and bad in human society flow from this incontrovertible truth. The same psychological mechanisms exploited for ill by power hungry egomaniacs like Trump have been utilized by other leaders to mobilize segments of society in pursuit of noble causes (i.e.:MLK Jr.).  

[Cactus Jack]

I agree with the posters elsewhere that a Democrat wave is building.  That danger is the final reason to support Moore. The GOP has things to accomplish, especially regarding the courts.  We cannot allow another Democrat in now, who will try to screw up the works. 

I want the courts to at least give me and the country protection from some of the thinking of some hard left Democrats.

Pedophiles: at least they're not Democrats.

He is not a pedophile.  If they occurred, they were 40 years ago.  A person can be forgiven for acts 40 years.  The GOP if it wakes up can expel him he lied about the yearbook.  The proof would come handwriting analysis not DNA analysis.

A person cannot be forgiven for child molestation, especially when they refuse to admit what happened.

You're speaking to a survivor. From the survivor community: Fuck Roy Moore, fuck anyone who defends him, and fuck you.

(can't wait to get death points for this message. worth it.)

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

I agree with the posters elsewhere that a Democrat wave is building.  That danger is the final reason to support Moore. The GOP has things to accomplish, especially regarding the courts.  We cannot allow another Democrat in now, who will try to screw up the works. 

I want the courts to at least give me and the country protection from some of the thinking of some hard left Democrats.

Pedophiles: at least they're not Democrats.

He is not a pedophile.  If they occurred, they were 40 years ago.  A person can be forgiven for acts 40 years.  The GOP if it wakes up can expel him he lied about the yearbook.  The proof would come handwriting analysis not DNA analysis.

A person cannot be forgiven for child molestation, especially when they refuse to admit what happened.

You're speaking to a survivor. From the survivor community: Fuck Roy Moore, fuck anyone who defends him, and fuck you.

(can't wait to get death points for this message. worth it.)

Came here to post this

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

There is neither theoretical reason nor empirical evidence to claim that AV encourages "encourages please-all centrism" anymore than another system.

As for the idea of "let's keep something bad now so we can get something better later", well, it is and has always been one of the most harmful pathologies of the radical left. Seem like people just never learn...

Yes there is, although you didn't bother to listen when I explained them at the time either so I'm likely banging my head against the wall. If you don't think AV would encourage parties choosing transfer-friendly candidates (centrists) or rather rule out polarising candidates who likely cannot command the support of 50%+ of the constituency's electorate, and risk losing them their seat - I don't know what to tell you.

There are not many constituencies in the country where my politics could gain over 50% support - so not only could I look forward to an Australian Greens type scenario in terms of zero or a solitary seat for millions of votes but even where agreeable leftists have won - and can win on a plurality of votes - they'd be at risk.

Of course you're likely going to accuse me of prioritising tactical advantage over fairness but given none of the voting systems on offer even attempt to achieve fairness I feel pretty justified in my decision.

Third-party candidates are just as likely to be at the ideological extremes as they are to be in the center. You obviously had 2010 in mind when you made that post, but then 2015 came along and Labour bled quite a few votes to UKIP. I don't know if these voters would ultimately have second-preffed Labour or the Tories, but at the very least, it would have given Miliband a reason to make more populist appeals rather than try to win over the middle ground - which IIRC is exactly what you wanted.

A solid left-wing force can command a majority of the vote, if faced with a clear enough alternative. The fact that you don't believe it can shows your lack of confidence in your own values, which is another sad pathology of the left.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

58 out of 435 when about half the country wants him impeached? Yep sounds like a democracy to me

Not cool to try and impeach a President, regardless of how you feel about them.

As I said back during Obama, talk of any Presidential impeachment is ridiculous.

I don't understand why Democrats don't prepare impeachment. Or bills to create it.

You cannot impeach someone just because you disagree with their policies. This is why I roll my eyes at stupid conservatives who say "Impeach Obama!" No matter how much you disagree, no laws were broken. We have to stop this already.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

A model effortpost

I thought this was interesting, so I did some research and found a law review article on the subject. I wasn't able to find a free version and its 68 pages long, so I'll just highlight some of what I consider interesting.

Forty-three states have treason statutes or constitutional provisions. The states without are Hawaii, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Hawaii is the only state to never have a law against treason.

The legal position of treason against the states today is sort of fuzzy; treason against the states COULD be a thing, but the window of what would specifically apply as state treason would be small, as states lack jurisdiction to punish treason against the United States as a whole. Also, most of the twenty-one states which have treason as part of their constitution nowhere actually define the punishment for it. If push ever came to shove, they would likely be deemed non self-executing and not currently valid.

As for why and how long they've been there, state treason statutes go back to a June 26, 1776, resolution of the Continental Congress:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

And the topic of state treason was a hotly debated question at the Constitutional Convention. The vote on the proposal that the United States have sole power to declare punishment for treason failed 6-5.

State treason language, while mostly sticking to the "comfort or aid" language above, has changed and varied over time. For example, South Carolina's 1805 statute that made it treason to connect oneself, directly or indirectly, “with any slave or slaves in a state of actual insurrection within this state” or to “excite, counsel, advise, induce, aid, comfort or assist any slave or slaves to raise or attempt to raise an insurrection within this state.

Since the ratification of the Constitution, state courts have completed only two treason prosecutions, both of which occurred over 150 years ago. The first was Rhode Island's 1844 prosecution of Thomas Dorr; the second was Virginia's 1859 prosecution of John Brown. There were a few before the constitution as well, Respublica v. Carlisle (High Treason against Pennsylvania in 1778) being a good example. The Dorr trial is really interesting; Dorr tried to enforce a "People's Constitution" with universal manhood suffrage over the existing government still based on the royal charter. Details here. In both cases, defense counsel argued that treason could only be a federal crime and in both cases the defendants were found guilty.

There were a few more recent cases that were dropped, including some of the strikers in the Homestead Strikes. The most recent was Ohio v. Raley in 1954. In that case, three defendants were separately indicted for contempt of the Ohio Un-American Activities Commission. After having been sworn as witnesses before the Commission, the defendants each refused to testify in response to certain questions and were after charged with treason. They were found guilty, but the case was reversed on other grounds by SCOTUS.

[Landslide Lyndon]

Those RINOs must be proud of their party of Lincoln.

Many 1860 Republicans would have agreed.

Indeed.  The Republican Party since its founding in the 1850s has always been the party of nativists. The Radical Abolitionsts were only one of the wings of that party when it was founded.  Know-Nothing nativists were another major wing.  The founding impetus for the party that brought the two different ideologies together was the common desire to make certain that Southern slaveowners couldn't bring their Black slaves West, tho the reason why they were against that was completely different.

[Dr. MB]

Depends — would you prefer membership of a party that actually exists, or one where the average Atlas poster would have a non-zero chance of winning said party's presidential nomination by virtue of being a warm body capable of making a vaguely intelligible concession speech to their ten supporters on election night?

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

I mean, they're right but for the wrong reasons. 9/11 was a reaction to our imperial overreach in the Middle East. We didn't deserve it but frankly, anyone who is surprised by the events that happened that day are part of the problem and not the solution.

How long are we going to just say 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 and use it as an excuse to intervene in these backwater hellholes filled by people who hate us? We literally set the conditions for ISIS to rise, and I can't blame any young Iraqi or Syrian for joining their cause when you consider the alternative is NATO and the west blowing up their schools, bridges, and hospitals to secure their oil.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

- Randy Bryce shouldn’t be elected dogcatcher.

^ Terrible user right here ^

Sorry fam

Child support is an extremely broken and rigged system, so that is not something that should be held against anyone.  My only gripe is that he eventually paid it off anyways, instead of taking a principled stand against the system.

What are these problems then?

How about this case where someone was determined to owe huge amounts of back child support accrued during time they were in prison (on death row after a wrongful murder conviction) that they were unable to pay due to the circumstances

How about this case where someone was determined to owe child support for a child that was born without their permission (after they were lied to about the usage of birth control and about genetic infertility)

How about this case where someone who was a victim of rape was determined to owe child support for a child born as a result of the rape

As long as cases like these exist, I think we would be better off as a society getting rid of child support systems altogether than to have cases like these continuing to exist.

Yes, these cases are rare, but the depravity of what happened in each of these cases is immense enough to make me think we would be better off ending the entire thing overall.

Don't abuse these people's cases to defend #IRONSTACHE being a deadbeat who only paid child support to quiet things down before a house campaign. Many (like 99% women) people desperately need child support to support their child and themselves(especially women, who are systemically pushed from high paying jobs that give the ability to be financially independant), especially in cases of domestic abuse(we really don't want abusers to be able to keep their victims hostage because they're the only breadwinner). Repealing child support would cause devastating consequences that would far outweigh the benefits of the much rarer problems it imposes. We didn't legalize rape because of lynchings. Why should this be any different?

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

IceAge seriously deserves a Nobel Prize for fighting the good fight in this thread:

All of that is very true - Nazism is a very confused ideology but fundamentally its based on nationalism and racist politics which

And Western Conservatism is still an odd beast with conservatives all over the continent still being pretty different and that was even more the case in the 1920s and 1930s.  In Germany their conservatives were broadly anti-democracy and they were especially critical of the Weimar constitution, supportive of the imperial state and the monarchy, still incredibly bitter about the defeat of Germany in the war and seeked to Make Germany Great Again, highly militaristic and dominated by the Prussian elites who held significant amounts of political and economic power pre-war; and although they lost a lot of the former they retained the latter.  They also were incredibly anti-Communist and anti-Socialist and just saw the two as being the same thing.  They also were anti-semitic as well or at least willing to use anti-semitism in their election campaigns if they thought that they could get a few votes.  Although a few Conservatives (the DVP; who's effective leader Gustav Stresemann served as Chancellor for a few months in 1923 and Foreign Minister in a billion governments between then and his death in 1929; a very interesting man and someone who helped to bridge the divide between Germany and the former Entente nations) eventually decided to work within the system with the pro-Weimar parties and kicking the above stuff into the long grass, the majority of them, lead by the incredibly reactionary DNVP, always seeked to destroy the Weimar state and to bring back the institutions of the past.  In that regard them hooking up with the NSDAP, who they felt that they could control and eventually push out once the time is right despite the Nazis clearly being the most popular party, makes sense and the Nazis had much greater links with German conservatism than with the left.

British Conservatism was different in that they generally accepted change a lot more and always had a more liberal element to them meaning that they generally weren't ever that sympathetic with fascism - although maybe if we had lost the war things would have been a lot different.  The same is true for the Republican Party as well: they were never the reactionary party that Conservatives in chunks of Europe were, and that's important.  I think that this is especially the case after Reagan and Thatcher basically went full economic liberalism with the other Conservative parties tending to come along with them: indeed the biggest changes to life generally and especially politics and the economy since the immediate post-war years were caused by politicians that identified as Conservatives, suggesting that there is this odd reformist gene within Conservatism in those places.

Greedo: in the UK I'd be considered a Republican, in that in principle I'd favour abolishing the monarchy and becoming a Republic.  On that vein, Sinn Féin are a left-wing Republican party - some would say far left - because they support a united Ireland.  Now this isn't something that I'd be willing to die on a hill over and its not that core a belief but it is a part of how I think about things.  However I'm clearly very different from the American Republican Party despite the same term being appropriate to use, and the two ideologies are very different.  Just because two things have the same name, it doesn't mean that they are at all comparable.  Nazism originates from Völkisch nationalism; an incredibly bizarre strain of nationalism that opposed foreign ideas, individualism and materialism and supported the creation of a 'superior society' based on German blood and 'superior' German culture.  This is especially where the race politics emerged from; that's where the Master Race idea some from, the hatred of racial intermixing, and especially incredibly, intensely anti-semitic politics.  Indeed that's where the Nazi hatred of the Bolsheviks came from: a strong feeling that it was somehow a "Jewish" ideology, plus also totally incompatible with the divided, hierarchical society that the NSDAP wanted.  Your older Conservatives at the time were Monarchists who seeked the restoration of Willheim and the return of the old Reich but younger elements seeked an alternative: that it didn't matter who the leader was but that they needed a strong leader who could return Germany back to its pre-war glory and remove the "parasitic elements" - an ever expanding definition which would eventually include the Jews, Roma people, LGBT people, 'race mixers', the Disabled, Socialists, Communists, Trade Unionists and other political enemies, and later on the Slavs, at least those who they thought couldn't be Germanised.  They adopted the "socialist" label for one main reason: simply to cloak themselves and to appeal to working class people in order to get votes.  Their policies, while at times interventionist, could never be described as socialism.