Why do Republicans suck?
- Thread starter Jimdamick
- Start date
Fogdog
Well-Known Member
Until 1400-1500 AD, it seems it was always been same. A small segment of the population with mad martial skills held power, usually around a clan or absolute monarch and enforced with edged weapons. With the occasional rock, club and torch thrown into the mix. Horses, draft animals and peasants carried the load of producing food and means of transport while warriors did most of the fighting. Peasants had little say or stake in outcomes.
Since then, things rapidly changed. Lethality and ease of use of canons, firearms, other technology changed the equation of who held power. The industrial age made people more valuable because their work was more productive and skills necessary to produce those widgets made it undesirable to just kill off dissent. Alongside with that change came social changes that were demanded by social groups that were needed by ruling groups to maintain order in more complex and productive society. The rise of the bourgeoise -- knowledge workers and eventually proletariats -- industrial workers.
Not to mention population growth. We have too many people on the planet right now. This isn't about that but with all of those people come fragility in society's ability to feed, clothe, house all those people.
I don't know where I'm going with all of this. What I hope I'm conveying is the iron age gave way the industrial age and modern eras seem to be changing ever more rapidly. Machine age, age of aerospace, communication age all as different from each other as the industrial age was to the iron age before it. It's not just tech that is changing, unless one considers society as a technology. Our societies are evolving rapidly too. We've talked some about 19th century politics and statecraft compared to 21st century politics. We've gone from gunboat and power politics of the 1800's to soft politics where nations compete based upon economic growth, development of new technologies, communication and cooperation. Russia is stuck in the 19th century mode of statecraft and it's failing. China might have been out-doing everybody in excellence at 21st century development but it's society is stuck with autocratic authoritarian rule which stifles development. We'll see.
We don't understand humanity well enough to know how best to organize ourselves. Democracy is a societal hack that allows a society to change when the underlying population comes to consensus about how to address its failures. Authoritarian systems fail to adapt until the whole system crashes. In the past 200 years, social safety nets and social services emerged and the best performing societies today contain a mixture of capitalism and socialism. Some more one way, others more the other.
I'm coming to believe that social democracy is coming to dominate the 21st world. Not because it's the right thing to do but because those societies are more robust to change and chance than autocracies. Or the US model, which is much more capitalist and places higher emphasis on luck -- how wealthy the parents are, for example -- than societies with more equitable access to resources that are needed for people to thrive, such as education, healthcare and housing.
Fogdog
Well-Known Member
Roger A. Shrubber
Well-Known Member
they don't need fools who follow them, all they need are enough wolves who will follow their orders, unquestioningly
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
Lawyers are paid good money to listen to it, so we don't have to. Jailing Roger, Bannon and the other Trump minions would give the American body politic a real enema.
Roger A. Shrubber
Well-Known Member
i watched the whole thing....it was pretty much all the same, but at the end stone accused the lawyer of molesting his own children....
i hope trump and his whole cadre get what they have coming to them...nothing but criminal fuckbag assholes...arrogant criminal fuckbag assholes...
CunningCanuk
Well-Known Member
Was this recent or from before he became a convicted criminal?
Roger A. Shrubber
Well-Known Member
https://www.thedailybeast.com/florida-lawyer-larry-klayman-files-dollar5-million-defamation-suit-against-roger-stone
i'm assuming this is the same instance, would have been august of last year
Polly Wog
Well-Known Member
Evidently they're releasing some videos from a couple years ago. Obviously he was pardoned. But I could be wrong. The articles in the Washington post. I believe. I just thought it was funny as heck..
Bagginski
Well-Known Member
Love it: while Stone is spewing shit, a bar at the top bewails a shortage of toilet paper…I will buy drinks for the house the day Stone enters prison to serve the sentence he deserves….
jkahndb0
Well-Known Member
I am American. If i had to be labeled it would be as a Republican. Right now i do believe that the democratic and republican parties suck. Both sides are bad choices and for me it has been picking the lesser of two every fourth november.
(not directed at any individual)
*Also like it or not the Trump Administration did a good job.
cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
This completely dismisses the institutional difference in how the two parties act.
To the asterisked addendum: fuck no.
Roger A. Shrubber
Well-Known Member
and he is apparently delusional...or hold highly suspect values...i would be hard pressed to find 3 good things trump did in 4 years...every dollar he "saved " people then is a debt he left us holding now, that will cost twice as much to repay...he flatly didn't have a foreign policy, his policy was to lick the nuts of every dictator on the planet while threatening to take us out of NATO...his domestic policy was to give his rich friends enormous tax breaks that the rest of the country has to pay for. he may have lowered taxes on some families, but it will cost them more in the long run in lost child care credits, lost tax credits, higher prices that we're paying now because of his total failure at foreign trade...hows those tariffs on china panning out?....so gas prices were lower? that's because no one was buying gas for quite a while during the lockdown, and they were forced to lower prices , the second that was over, gas prices started to climb, during the trump administration...all in all, he handed Biden a bag of wormy shit, and Joe has done a great job of fixing trump's fuck ups so far.
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
You have a right to believe bullshit and spout it too.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
I disagree strongly. Leading our manufacturing sector into a recession (prior to the pandemic), abandoning our allies across the planet, shutting down the government twice for his little temper tantrums that cost our economy billions, his trade war that we got nothing from with China that cost the economy about a trillion dollars, tax cut for the rich that did not help the economy, his dismantling of our national pandemic response team (because Obama set it up) which left us blind, Trump's incompetent handling of the pandemic that crushed our economy and led to the most job losses in American history, leaving our citizens vulnerable to the constant propaganda attack by burying (and firing anyone who spoke out about it) information about the foreign militaries that were conducting them, on and on, and worse of all his 4 year campaign of lies (stop the steal was coined in 2016 by Roger Stone) that led up to his attempted destruction of our democracy in his shitty attempt to overturn the will of the 81 million + Americans that voted him out of office.
There is no 'both sides' in the propaganda attack, troll all they want, CNN is not Fox news for the Democrats, they don't sit there and cherry pick facts and spin anything and everything that they can to paint 'their side' better. There is no Sinclair Broadcasting that is bought by the Democratic backers that do the same cat fishing as 'local news'. There is no foreign dictators that are working with the Democrats to brainwash the American public with their nonstop spam.
The Republicans have caused a recession in every single presidential administration since Reagan.
The 'both sides' narrative is bullshit.
CunningCanuk
Well-Known Member
Fogdog
Well-Known Member
I take exception to administrations that try to establish themselves as a dictatorship by attempting a coup. I have other gripes but that's top on my list.