Dem Post Mortem

[bilby]

papers like the NY Times that were around for both periods hated/loved Hitler just as much and in the same way that they hate/love Trump.

We can only hope that Trump does as much for America as Hitler did for Germany.

Be careful what you wish for. Hitler set up Germany to become the most powerful and influential European nation, and it still is.

...and all it took was the total destruction of the nation's cities and factories.

When I was working in factories in the UK as a young man (1980s), we had machines that were built in the 1920s that were still in use. Most buildings were poorly laid out, having been built in the 19th century and altered to accomodate new businesses and new processes over the course of a century or more.

Knocking the whole lot down, scrapping the machines, and starting iver from scratch would have been a good long-term option; But it would always have been a disaster in the short term, so it didn't happen.

In Germany, the RAF, USAAF, the US 6th and 12th Army Groups, and the British/Canadian 12th Army Group did the job that no manager or factory owner dared to suggest. It put Germany in the box-seat; And then the Marshall Plan handed them the capital they needed to rebuild (not because Marshall, Truman and Eisenhower were great philanthropists, but because they needed a bulwark against the Soviet Union as the Cold War got underway).

If you are lucky, Trump might utterly destroy your country, and it might only take a couple of decades to rebuild and once again dominate the world.

If you are lucky.

 

[ZiprHead]

The Americans who use America as a punching bag more typically are distancing themselves from the rest of us -- they appear to imagine belonging to the group they're criticizing means they deserve credit for self-criticism even though their intent was to criticize other members of the group, never themselves. They're virtue signaling.

I can't think of anyone that criticized America more than Trump.

 

[thebeave]

Its almost never easy or inexpensive adding a bathroom after the fact. You have to tap into a hot and cold water source from somewhere nearby, and that means tearing up floors, walls and/or ceilings and patching and painting them back up again. Drains too, which can be even more of a problem, as you have to have the drain slope towards its destination at 1/4" per foot. If you're a small business having to add an extra bathroom, the cost is likely prohibitive.

A small water heater, if necessary at all, can be purchased for less than $200. And a few public restrooms would be enough; no need for every small business to have one. (There's a number-of-employees threshold for applying rules to small businesses. Perhaps some of those thresholds should be raised anyway.)

Well, sure that would work. But you will need a new electric circuit added in (possibly 220V) or a gas line, both of which could be as much, if not more, trouble than adding a hot water pipe. In a mall or airport you can have centrally located bathrooms, but that won't work for a standalone building.

These little Bosch units are great. I installed one once. 120V plug in. Perfect for just a sink. Or in a state where they route the water supply through the slab and it takes forever and a day to get any hot water out of the damn faucet.

Yeah, I've played around with one of those once. A friend bought one to add hot water to the sink for his small business in a strip mall. They are pretty cool little units. Unfortunately, it couldn't be used because it was too big to fit in the small vanity that was there, plus it needed its own new 15A circuit and there was no practical way to run a T&P discharge pipe to the outside. All of which made it too costly and inappropriate to use, so he returned it.

 

[Elixir]

Hmm, yes, Liz Cheney was totally going to vote for Trump before he laid all those terrible bad things and fun nicknames on her.

Hmm, yes, Liz DID vote for Trump before he said and did all those bad things (to and about her )
She expressed regret for that mistake later.
If your point was that Republicans don’t criticize each other like Dems do, it’s a yuuuge fail.

 

[Bomb#20]

Hmm, yes, Liz Cheney was totally going to vote for Trump before he laid all those terrible bad things and fun nicknames on her.

Hmm, yes, Liz DID vote for Trump before he said and did all those bad things (to and about her )
She expressed regret for that mistake later.
If your point was that Republicans don’t criticize each other like Dems do, it’s a yuuuge fail.

Just speculating here, but there may have been other intervening events, after she voted for him but before he said what he said about her, that may have contributed in some small way to her loss of enthusiasm for voting for him.

 

[Bomb#20]

The Americans who use America as a punching bag more typically are distancing themselves from the rest of us -- they appear to imagine belonging to the group they're criticizing means they deserve credit for self-criticism even though their intent was to criticize other members of the group, never themselves. They're virtue signaling.

I can't think of anyone that criticized America more than Trump.

And you don't take that as a sign of self-hatred, do you? You're helping make my case.

 

[Elixir]

Hmm, yes, Liz Cheney was totally going to vote for Trump before he laid all those terrible bad things and fun nicknames on her.

Hmm, yes, Liz DID vote for Trump before he said and did all those bad things (to and about her )
She expressed regret for that mistake later.
If your point was that Republicans don’t criticize each other like Dems do, it’s a yuuuge fail.

Just speculating here, but there may have been other intervening events, after she voted for him but before he said what he said about her, that may have contributed in some small way to her loss of enthusiasm for voting for him.

Hoookay then, you have a point.
Repugs never say bad things about each other unless each other has said bad things about them … I suppose. Whereas - ?

ETA : Mea Culpa that's harsh, and yeah I think Dems are more into self flagellation than Reps. Thing is, when Reps run each other down, they're way careful to "otherize" them first, so they won't be seen as eating their own. So it's not all one-sided, but you ca argue proportions.

 

[Derec]

Prosecuting offenders is not "weaponizing criminal and civil law";

It is when prosecutions are targeted at political opponents.
Let me ask you a question. If a Republican AG or DA invented "novel legal theories" to go after Kamala Harris for example even though the crime she is being prosecuted for is a misdemeanor past the statute of limitations, would that be "weaponizing of criminal law"? If somebody alleged that Kamala Harris inappropriately touched him sometime in the mid 2000s (accuser can't quite remember what year, much less day), would going after her for millions in a solidly red county (and thus a majority of the jury pool is inclined against her) be "weaponizing civil law"?

And the law is supposed to go after offenders.

Without bias or favor. Instead Alvin Bragg downgrades clear felonies like armed robberies while upgrading a misdemeanor like misclassifying a campaign expenditure to a felony because the defendant is a political opponent. Note that both the federal prosecutors and the former Manhattan DA Cy Vance decided not to pursue charges in this case.
And Alvin Bragg jumping the gun with this rather weak case probably made Trump more popular and also soured the public opinion about the other, far more legitimate, cases.

Trump was given special treatment, in that he was treated less harshly than most defendants would have been.

No, other than Trump nobody else would have been prosecuted given these facts.
Certainly no Democrat would have been.
And again, this is Manhattan DA's office under Trump. It's the county where you can hold up a bodega with a knife and only face petit larceny charges.
Knife-wielding suspect has felony charge reduced under Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s policies
And yet you sincerely believe that upgrading a non-violent misdemeanor to 34 felony counts had nothing to do with politics? Really?

I think Dems' efforts to destroy Trump by legal means actually made him more popular and contributed to his victory.

I think you are right. But that shouldn't persuade us to abandon rule of law.

Not finding loopholes to get around a statute of limitations and not targeting prosecutions against political opponents is not "abandoning the rule of law".
Trump is often accused of wanting to prosecute political opponents. He may do so, but that accusation was blunted a lot by Dems like Bragg prosecuting him on charges like this one.

Well, if that was the weakest case, then the fact that he was found guilty provides good reason to expedite those even stronger cases, which if they are less weak, will surely lead to further convictions.

It's not going to happen now that he won the reelection. The Fulton County case could theoretically proceed, but most likely won't. The federal cases will be kiboshed.

But it probably wasn't the weakest case; Rather, it was the case most difficult for the voting public to comprehend, so the convictions could be spun by the convict as unjust bullying, when in fact they were a perfectly just and normal response to his having committed crimes.

It is not difficult to comprehend that there are rules about classifying campaign expenses, and that it is a misdemeanor. It is hard to comprehend how a misdemeanor past the statute of limitations can be upgraded to 34 felonies based on a connection with a federal law Trump was not even charged with, much less convicted of.
And it was not difficult to comprehend that Bragg's motivation was political.

The double standard from the "Party of Law and Order", and from law and order advocates such as yourself, is glaring, if unsurprising.

Being for law and order does not mean that law should be misused to target political opponents. Whether that is being done by Gaetz (should he become AG) or Bragg.
It is certainly a double standard to downgrade clear and violent felonies to misdemeanors and at the same time upgrade clear misdemeanors to felonies based on "novel legal theories" just because the target is a political opponent.

Trump has committed crimes that would typically result in jail time.

Most likely, but this wasn't one of them.

What's the protocol for inaugaurating a President who is in jail?

I don't know. We had a presidential candidate who campaigned from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, but he was a Socialist and never came close to actually winning.

 

[Tigers!]

I never said history shouldn't be taught. Kids need to learn about it, but at some point using the U.S. as a punching bag now for things that happened long ago needs to ease the fuck up. There's no critical thinking skills involved in the lightweight white knighting self-hatred that so many liberals just can't seem to get enough of.

That's some bullshit. Conservatives want history erased,

Hmm. Pol Pot tried very hard to erase Cambodis's previous history yet no one on here would call him conservative. The Khmer Rouge were lauded as progressive for far too many years.
The French Revolutionaries tried to start a new calendar at year 0. Hardly the work of conservatives.

not discussed. Having classroom discussions about race, slavery, and genocide is exactly what upsets them, you see it on tv every night, scare stories about liberal teachers or seminars that committed the sin of encouraging conversation.

 

[Politesse]

I never said history shouldn't be taught. Kids need to learn about it, but at some point using the U.S. as a punching bag now for things that happened long ago needs to ease the fuck up. There's no critical thinking skills involved in the lightweight white knighting self-hatred that so many liberals just can't seem to get enough of.

That's some bullshit. Conservatives want history erased,

Hmm. Pol Pot tried very hard to erase Cambodis's previous history yet no one on here would call him conservative. The Khmer Rouge were lauded as progressive for far too many years.
The French Revolutionaries tried to start a new calendar at year 0. Hardly the work of conservatives.

not discussed. Having classroom discussions about race, slavery, and genocide is exactly what upsets them, you see it on tv every night, scare stories about liberal teachers or seminars that committed the sin of encouraging conversation.

Your post would make sense if we were talking about any of those places, or if I agreed that liberal and conservative are terms that apply to those nation's politics, or if I claimed that only conservatives ever seek to cover up history and never communist authoritarian nutcases. But of course I did not say any of those things, so let's try to stay on topic, hey?

 

[Tigers!]

I never said history shouldn't be taught. Kids need to learn about it, but at some point using the U.S. as a punching bag now for things that happened long ago needs to ease the fuck up. There's no critical thinking skills involved in the lightweight white knighting self-hatred that so many liberals just can't seem to get enough of.

That's some bullshit. Conservatives want history erased,

Hmm. Pol Pot tried very hard to erase Cambodis's previous history yet no one on here would call him conservative. The Khmer Rouge were lauded as progressive for far too many years.
The French Revolutionaries tried to start a new calendar at year 0. Hardly the work of conservatives.

not discussed. Having classroom discussions about race, slavery, and genocide is exactly what upsets them, you see it on tv every night, scare stories about liberal teachers or seminars that committed the sin of encouraging conversation.

Your post would make sense if we were talking about any of those places, or if I agreed that liberal and conservative are terms that apply to those nation's politics, or if I claimed that only conservatives ever seek to cover up history and never communist authoritarian nutcases. But of course I did not say any of those things, so let's try to stay on topic, hey?

You, not I, are the one who claimed that "conservatives want history erased". That statement sounds like you meant all conservatives. A little more preciseness at times would be useful.

 

[bigfield]

I never said history shouldn't be taught. Kids need to learn about it, but at some point using the U.S. as a punching bag now for things that happened long ago needs to ease the fuck up. There's no critical thinking skills involved in the lightweight white knighting self-hatred that so many liberals just can't seem to get enough of.

That's some bullshit. Conservatives want history erased,

Hmm. Pol Pot tried very hard to erase Cambodis's previous history yet no one on here would call him conservative. The Khmer Rouge were lauded as progressive for far too many years.
The French Revolutionaries tried to start a new calendar at year 0. Hardly the work of conservatives.

not discussed. Having classroom discussions about race, slavery, and genocide is exactly what upsets them, you see it on tv every night, scare stories about liberal teachers or seminars that committed the sin of encouraging conversation.

Conservatives also want to erase history.

In Australia we see this when conservatives whine about so-called "Black-armband history", where students learn about the less flattering aspects of Australia's history. They want that history to be ignored and forgotten.

Conservatives act like students should only be taught the parts of history that create a sense of national pride and success. They aren't interested in teaching history so that we can learn from it, because that's how you get progressives.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Great thing about EuroChristians colonialism.
When they steal stuff it remains theirs forever. Because they stole it according to the Christian culture of the day!
Tom

People have been conquering each other's territories since time immemorial. That's neither unique to European societies nor to Christian ones.
Including various Amerindian tribes and societies. You don't think Mexica/Aztec empire was just dropped in place from above, do you?

Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453. Are they "EuroChristian" too? Should they give it back to the rightful owners?

This is yet another thing people are sick of hearing.

America bad!!!

Yes, we've got serious issues that need addressing, but for Christ's sake, complaining about shit that was done 150* years ago and using it to insult the nation you live in now turns off tens of millions of people.

You can't have a discussion about e.g. the Tiananmen Square Massacre without some tedious blowhard saying, "But America did this Other Thing!"

*Yes, I know it didn't all happen 150 years ago, but I'm not going to make a list of it all. The point is that it's long in the past and consistently bringing it up does nothing to help us now.

If "they" are willing to instigate the next national disaster specifically because they didn't want children to learn about a previous national disaster of a similar kind, that seems to me like a very literal demonstration of a certain old aphorism concerning history.

You know, I get why a six year old might be distressed by a nuanced discussion of history. How could the president have ordered something "bad" to happen, isn't the president "good"? How can a "hero" hurt someone? This sounds like a good discussion to have with your pre-operational phase child after watching Captain America 5: The Villains Are Back and They Are Us.

But the role of adults ought to be to help guide them toward a more nuanced understanding of good and bad, right and wrong. Pretending to be unable to distinguish between "Some Americans did a very bad and controversial thing in 1848" and "America bad!!!" is childish and unattractive in anyone over the age of fourteen or so. Don't feign greater ignorance than you actually harbor. Actually being stupid is a disability. Pretending to be stupid for rhetorical gain is peevish at best.

I never said history shouldn't be taught. Kids need to learn about it, but at some point using the U.S. as a punching bag now for things that happened long ago needs to ease the fuck up. There's no critical thinking skills involved in the lightweight white knighting self-hatred that so many liberals just can't seem to get enough of.

Acknowledging history isn't the same as self-hatred. Go on though, continue with bullshit straw man arguments.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

"Wahhh stop criticizing America wahhh".

 

[Politesse]

I never said history shouldn't be taught. Kids need to learn about it, but at some point using the U.S. as a punching bag now for things that happened long ago needs to ease the fuck up. There's no critical thinking skills involved in the lightweight white knighting self-hatred that so many liberals just can't seem to get enough of.

That's some bullshit. Conservatives want history erased,

Hmm. Pol Pot tried very hard to erase Cambodis's previous history yet no one on here would call him conservative. The Khmer Rouge were lauded as progressive for far too many years.
The French Revolutionaries tried to start a new calendar at year 0. Hardly the work of conservatives.

not discussed. Having classroom discussions about race, slavery, and genocide is exactly what upsets them, you see it on tv every night, scare stories about liberal teachers or seminars that committed the sin of encouraging conversation.

Your post would make sense if we were talking about any of those places, or if I agreed that liberal and conservative are terms that apply to those nation's politics, or if I claimed that only conservatives ever seek to cover up history and never communist authoritarian nutcases. But of course I did not say any of those things, so let's try to stay on topic, hey?

You, not I, are the one who claimed that "conservatives want history erased". That statement sounds like you meant all conservatives. A little more preciseness at times would be useful.

Dude, you know my post wasn't about freaking Cambodia. Enough with the derail.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

*The billionaires are now in control of our politics* "hey guys we need to stop talking about trans stuff"

 

[bigfield]

*The billionaires are now in control of our politics* "hey guys we need to stop talking about trans stuff"

Talking about trans stuff has largely been a huge victory for the GOP. Politicians and political commentators have spent a huge amount of time either demonising trans people or defending them, and this leaves less time to pitch help on cost of living, workers rights, or other things that workers need to hear from the Dems to have a reason to vote for them.

The GOP are trolls. Their backers are trolls. The Dems and the media bite the hook every time.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

*The billionaires are now in control of our politics* "hey guys we need to stop talking about trans stuff"

Talking about trans stuff has largely been a huge victory for the GOP. Politicians and political commentators have spent a huge amount of time either demonising trans people or defending them, and this leaves less time to pitch help on cost of living, workers rights, or other things that workers need to hear from the Dems to have a reason to vote for them.

The GOP are trolls. Their backers are trolls. The Dems and the media bite the hook every time.

Last I checked the dems in this campaign were mainly focusing on abortion. Not trans people.

 

[bilby]

I never said history shouldn't be taught. Kids need to learn about it, but at some point using the U.S. as a punching bag now for things that happened long ago needs to ease the fuck up. There's no critical thinking skills involved in the lightweight white knighting self-hatred that so many liberals just can't seem to get enough of.

That's some bullshit. Conservatives want history erased,

Hmm. Pol Pot tried very hard to erase Cambodis's previous history yet no one on here would call him conservative. The Khmer Rouge were lauded as progressive for far too many years.
The French Revolutionaries tried to start a new calendar at year 0. Hardly the work of conservatives.

not discussed. Having classroom discussions about race, slavery, and genocide is exactly what upsets them, you see it on tv every night, scare stories about liberal teachers or seminars that committed the sin of encouraging conversation.

Your post would make sense if we were talking about any of those places, or if I agreed that liberal and conservative are terms that apply to those nation's politics, or if I claimed that only conservatives ever seek to cover up history and never communist authoritarian nutcases. But of course I did not say any of those things, so let's try to stay on topic, hey?

You, not I, are the one who claimed that "conservatives want history erased". That statement sounds like you meant all conservatives. A little more preciseness at times would be useful.

*Precision.

You're welcome.

 

[Tigers!]

I never said history shouldn't be taught. Kids need to learn about it, but at some point using the U.S. as a punching bag now for things that happened long ago needs to ease the fuck up. There's no critical thinking skills involved in the lightweight white knighting self-hatred that so many liberals just can't seem to get enough of.

That's some bullshit. Conservatives want history erased,

Hmm. Pol Pot tried very hard to erase Cambodis's previous history yet no one on here would call him conservative. The Khmer Rouge were lauded as progressive for far too many years.
The French Revolutionaries tried to start a new calendar at year 0. Hardly the work of conservatives.

not discussed. Having classroom discussions about race, slavery, and genocide is exactly what upsets them, you see it on tv every night, scare stories about liberal teachers or seminars that committed the sin of encouraging conversation.

Your post would make sense if we were talking about any of those places, or if I agreed that liberal and conservative are terms that apply to those nation's politics, or if I claimed that only conservatives ever seek to cover up history and never communist authoritarian nutcases. But of course I did not say any of those things, so let's try to stay on topic, hey?

You, not I, are the one who claimed that "conservatives want history erased". That statement sounds like you meant all conservatives. A little more preciseness at times would be useful.

*Precision.

You're welcome.

Thank you