The thing to keep in mind here is FOX News has a responsibility to filter out people like her and find someone who can speak intelligently on the topic. Saying she set the movement back is a bit disingenuous considering FOX was looking for this, struck gold, and now are pretending she represents the values of the movement. FOX News is the bad actor, she’s just an idiot who got used.
The only real story here is that Trump supporters are so neutered and locked in their own mental prisons they can’t just say what they feel when given the planned opportunity. Something tells me if Trump hung with any of these people, he’d immediately tell them all to grow a pair.
Everyone’s rhetoric veers off into flights of fancy. Team red or team blue, every argument spins wildly into some hot take completely detached from reality. It’s like one group compiles a list of facts which are neither here nor there, and the next group weaves it into some rhetoric designed to rile the mob and crystalize some false narrative.
I feel like this presidency is underwhelming to those who were expecting Biden to transform into Elizabeth Warren. Really, Biden has done what he said he’d do, and you guys are mad you lost the election. That’s fine, I would have preferred someone more to your tastes too, but to say he’s weak is to just give the right more ammo.
I don’t know if the divide here is actually left or right. I think any reasonable person can see the complexities here. What seems to have a party divide is the interpretation of these complexities.
What really strikes me most about the whole matter is that we seemed to have tripped over some loophole - where if you’re feeling particularly predatory one night, and you hear about a riot breaking out, you can grab a gun and see what kind of trouble you can get yourself into. If you wait for the right conditions you could have some murderers wet-dream. This shouldn’t be allowed to stand.
It’s hard to determine if this is what Kyle was thinking, but it seems his intentions here would speak to the heart of the matter. I suppose, even with my typical liberal repulsion to someone carrying a gun and defending a store that’s towns over, I can understand that his actions could fall under self-defense, or that he came to this situation without an intention to cause harm.
These things get complicated. Personally, I figure he was hoping to shoot someone and so I hope he gets the book thrown at him. But, that’s a personal opinion based primarily on media recountings during our ongoing culture wars.
At the end of the day, I don’t know what happened here, nor do I know Kyle or what was going through his mind during this. It’s entirely possible that, legally, he was in the right. It’s also possible that authorities will determine that, from his perspective, he was justified in what he did. On these, I can’t really speak, but while I personally feel he’s a murderer, I know if I were in his shoes I’d want a fair trial that gave a ruling based on established law and precedent.
That’s the problem with discussing cases like this, I know how I feel from the facts explained and my general sense of outrage that someone would drive to a riot and shoot people, but real life is always more complicated than we understand from the outset. It’s best to let the system run it’s course, and trust that the group looking into this is on the level.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that Musk is right and he can manage the money better, the other billionaires need to be brought to the well and Elon is just going to have to take the hit.
Yeah, I’d say they are. I personally think the Democrat’s war is the more correct one - mail-in, early voting, automatic registration are all things that seem OK to me, but I can put myself in a red hat and see how they could see that as an out-and-out attack.
From my perspective, Republicans pushing Voter ID, the constant recounts, and the insistence that everything is doomed constantly sure seem like an attack to me. So I think this is all largely a matter of perspective, and I think a fair read of both sides would point out they have some basic and obvious points in their favor.
What I outlined above provides more than enough distraction to prevent any kind of substantive political discussion about a proper future state here. I think that’s likely the real goal behind a lot of this rhetoric. Republicans especially like to “starve the dragon” as it were, and while that’s fine tactically, I think it’s telling of their mindset.
No space, biology, chemistry and time aren’t good enough reasons to justify forcing others to keep you alive. You’ve no objective reason to force others to pay for your healthcare beyond “society” and “everyone else is doing it”, you’re just appealing to bandwagon and authority.
Objectively speaking, healthcare is a universal need as it’s something every living person needs. Logically, since we know everyone needs it, and we understand morally that barriers such as the ability to pay for help shouldn’t block someone from receiving help, the only reasonable thing to do is off-load the cost away from the individual. Otherwise, you have immediately built a system where only certain classes of people (those who can afford it) get good quality of care, and the rest go without.
To your point about how nothing is a good enough reason for you to keep someone else alive, this is a horrible worldview that has led to the near-collapse of our society. A better approach here would be for us to agree intellectually that there’s no good enough reason TO LET SOMEONE DIE and to charge the government with building institutions towards that goal. It turns out that through taxes, we can abstract away from individual healthcare costs and frame a system where every single person in need can be covered. For a government charged with securing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I’m not sure I even see another way forward.
In fairness to The republicans, I don’t need a commission to tell me what I already know: Some republicans are willing to stage a revolt, try to mame other Republicans in their way, and then all pretend it never happened out of loyalty to the party. It’s hard to even process how dangerous this is. Had this insanity succeeded, Republicans would clearly have supported it. With this, they make clear that the Republic is one flash mob away from getting overthrown, and in some circumstances they support it.
This is the Republican thing to do when Democrats are in office, they did with Obama too. They’re only willing in participating if they own the process from one end to the other, which sounds petty and juvenile. Hard to believe these people are running the largest, most influential, government in human history.
Hot take, but I think it’s within the realm of reason that the officer did mean to go for their tazer but was confused in the heat of the moment. This reaffirms my belief that an armed police force so willing to meet escalation with escalation mostly serves to make tense situations worse.
If you’re looking for a libertarian view to latch onto here, consider that I (and any criminal not sentenced to death) have a constitutionally guaranteed right to life. The idea that some officer of the state can just ride on up to you, shoot you, and consider it justified because you said something provocative or moved a certain way flies in the face of the whole thing. We should expect people in such positions to do everything possible to prevent death, not sanction it as our default position.
If anything, we should be asking the police to assume way more risk (pay them more, but end qualified immunity), and basically make the bar so high that it would extremely hard for any state actors to ever justify killing a citizen. Perhaps in most cases, they wouldn’t even possess the means because ideally the expectation that a police officer doesn’t kill would be reinforced by not having them carry a killing device at all times. The current way things are structured, no wonder this shit happens constantly.
What is this, feudal china? We should open the fucking borders, let’s stop being afraid of poor people already
Greedy capitalists play woke on TV but do business in China against all morality and decency, this should outrage us all. How would a Libertarian non-interventionalist policy help end Chinese re-education camps?
I don’t understand, if it was premeditated days beforehand, and they all met at a Trump rally, where he directed them to execute their plan, how is that not incitement? The premeditation hurts his case, especially if it can be proved that he knew about the plan beforehand - which clearly he did, telling them to march down. Would be a big coincidence if he decided independently to do it too
What doesn’t bend, breaks. What would fill my heart with joy, is that instead of saber-rattling, if he were to acknowledge this horrible cycle and try to do something positive about it. Republicans like Mitch McConnell actually working towards bi-partisanship would not only be a sight to see but might actually heal some wounds.
Yeah, but what do you people know? You voted in a man with no experience to fix the government and brought us to the brink. Now the same people are calling Biden the boogeyman, what a joke.
If he turns on Trump before he concedes/inauguration then people won’t donate to the defense fund. Once they have squeezed Trump dry their tune will change.
The ratings argument is nonsense, this isn’t a rally. More people will tune in to the crazy one. I for one am voting for Biden but am more interested in finally seeing Trump pretend to be President for an hour. If he just acts normal for one hour he could really complicate things for Biden. I’m interested to see just how he’ll make it weird and awful.
These days I’m fairly progressive, I don’t agree with the libertarian agenda but I do see value in having more legitimate political views in the race and would support process improvements to see that happen. I think it could get a bit dangerous, two fairly conservative parties could split the vote for themselves, giving the other side an unfair advantage. I think you would need to couple it with some ranked voting system if you want to get an accurate gauge at what the people want. I think the problem with this approach is that invites a certain galvanization to your politics where you’d never see a democrat win again. I suppose some would be in favor of this, and perhaps it makes sense considering most South Carolinians would sooner die than vote blue so why keep forcing it on them? As a blue voter in SC I don’t know if I like it, but could be convinced on a matter of principle.