I'm voting Obama

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Are you sure that the deficits aren't at least partly because it's presently untenable to get a bill through Congress to increase the tax enough to start paying down the deficit?

Look, what I've been saying is that we need to do is either cut spending or raise taxes. It's time to make hard choices. I'd be willing to tolerate some spending cuts that most people probably wouldn't like, such as cuts to social security. Don't like the sound of that? Well, that's a fairly large part of the budget, unlike welfare benefiting the very poor, so I think it's between raising taxes or cutting social security, medicare and medicaid. Obama has expressed a willingness to try increasing taxes. The Republican candidates have been wishy-washy on whether they'll actually cut into these programs.

Nobody's going to listen to what I say, though. It makes perfect sense and is based on sound reasoning, so it will never be popular. That's just the way it is.

I'd go bankrupt before I cut a poor senior citizens social security.

Why? It's not like they can live on it! It's not paying enough! Not if you figure in medical bills!

I say we just throw out the program altogether. They like their Republicans so much. Let's let them live how their preferred political party would have them live. I say we give that demographic exactly what they keep voting for, year after year. They're feeling cocky now, but let's see how they feel when the medical bills start rolling in. Give those idiots two little years living hand-to-mouth while trying to fight cancer, and they'll be RIOTING for socialized medicine, buddy.

I don't have any reason to give a crap. By the time it were a problem for me, MY cohort would be middle-aged and casting the lion's share of the votes, and they've got enough sense in their heads to set up a good healthcare system, especially after seeing Granny kick off because Uncle Sam wouldn't pay for her chemo.

The best way you can get people to appreciate government is to take it away. I advocate it not because I don't know how miserable the libertarian scheme for the economy is but because I know EXACTLY how miserable it would be. I think our people should get the crappy, half-assed, virtually third-world government they've been clamoring for.

Last edited by WilliamWDelaney on 07 Dec 2011, 8:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'd agree that its a problem, that ideologies are very sharply divided right now and the number of people who stray from party line you can count on a hand - on a good day, on a typical you have three or four fingers to spare.


I posted a thread a while back when I found out about a Utah representative who had an idea on this. It actually looks quite doable:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt180007.html

As of right now though our bigger problem with social security is that there were some bills set in motion that did certain things to payroll and that has caused social security to dip into deficit this past year. Something like this would be great damage control.


The republican side of the story is that they've had plenty of ideas that have been sent out to pasture. I think both sides have ideas, both sides are pretty steadfast against the ideas the other side presents, and both like to paint the other party as the party of 'no'.


I don't know about *all* of that but taking this bit of text in isolation from what you're beliefs may or may not be - I will agree that sound reasoning is unpopular. Seems like any time anyone writes an incredibly meaningful thread, and particularly when it offers no chance at one-upsmanship or flames it falls right to the bottom of the stack, it may get one or two token responses but that's typically it. Once I forgot about what aspies try to say about themselves as the future world rulers and intellectual superheros of the world and expectations finally met reality, I felt a lot less jaded on that end.

At the end of the day it seems like you're either willing to dangle some red meat to get the fish biting or, you're stuck feeling like the Aflack duck. The times where you get to have your cake and eat it too are rare.

Yep. For example, anytime I have EVER tried to discuss the Return to Prudent Banking Act, which has bipartisan support that includes former contender for the WH John McCain, I have gotten crickets. It's not all that technical or complicated, and the reasoning behind it is pretty sound. The problem? Oh, easy: it doesn't make enough of the "other guys" wail in despair and anguish, so who cares?

Part of the problem with American politics is that all our politicians think about anymore when drafting legislation is, "what will cause the most gnashing of teeth for the other guy"? What low-rent white trash.

Hello, usually, if someone tells you plainly that you have a crappy idea, it's usually because you have a crappy idea.

@WWD

Now that you've kind of opened the door, I feel I can speak a bit more clearly without feeling like I'm randomly hijacking a thread for no reason. What you need to keep in mind is that the only way I *know* you is through what you put out here, and in the relatively short time you've been here you've said some mindbogglingly reprehensible things. This is the one that keeps coming to mind, from an exchange you had with AG some months ago:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp3691669.html#3691669

To me, that's crossing a real line, I referred to it earlier as a moral event horizon for a reason, you don't really come back from something like that. It didn't help that when I brought it up as a WTF, you doubled down on it with some truly over the top rants.

That thread was really what cemented my opinion of you as someone who I didn't care to expend my time arguing with as your posts were clearly belligerent, highly aggressive, and generally unpleasant. Why would anyone expose themselves to that unnecessarily? Sure, you also displayed some verbosity and moments of lucidity, but the overall impression was instability coupled with some truly repugnant opinions and a lack of self awareness.
Put another way, I could have agreed with everything you had to say but i found your presentation so off-putting that I wrote you off. Nor was I the only one to do so, that thread is full of references to your posts as crazy, delusional, and/or not rising to the level of needing rebuttal.

You say you've calmed down since then, and if I were just reading your posts in the religious threads I might agree, but then you posted the OP of this thread and the responses to it.

If you look back through this thread, you can clearly see that I was far from the only person not convinced you weren't pulling a Poe, as your OP was near satirical in it's praise of Obama, almost like the right-wing caricature of enraptured liberals worshiping the man. I barely even made the first page with a comment agreeing with another poster's image macro questioning the seriousness of your post.

My next two comments weren't even directed at you but at another poster who I felt was acting in a blinkered manner, who I've interacted with on similar topics in the past. You then reply to me by attempting to preemptively defuse a number of attacks on Obama that you assume I'll make despite me never having broached any of them, presumably having mistaken me for a conservative, a common error. No only that, but you rather presumptuously claim that I won't be able to offer a single legitimate criticism of the man, based not on anything I had or hadn't said up to that point but simply on your own evaluation of him.

When I posted several areas where I was critical of Obama, you produced a set of articles, interpreted them in the most flattering way possible, made some odd accusations that went far beyond what I'd actually posted, then pronounced all my concerns debunked.

My next post was my most overtly rude, because I'd found myself doing what I didn't want to do, which was arguing with you over point and counter-point. What I'd hoped to do was to disagree with your posts while avoiding engaging with you as much as possible, as previous experience had shown that to be a losing proposition given your personality and posting style. So while I was not surprised when you launched your broadside, it was not what I was looking for. Further, you should not be surprised if you drew moderator attention with that post, as heated a things get in here that level of direct personal attack has never been tolerated.

So, hopefully that clears up why I'm less than predisposed towards you. If you've truly calmed down, I'd suggest a re-reading of your posts in the older thread I linked, as they shed a lot of light on why I or anyone else who remembers that thread is likely to view you as over the top at minimum, and be cautious about devoting any time to engaging with you.

Then both you and the Golden Oldies can be poor.

ruveyn

I take what a lot of people say in couched, bullcrap, backdoor language, and I put it in the revolting light it deserves. For example:

Don't like that? What if I were to say, "I think there is too much government, and we ought to bring an end to the welfare state"? Or what if I were to say, "We pay too much in foreign aid. These countries don't do anything for us. Why should we do anything for them?" If I said that around conservatives like Raptor, I'd probably be praised for it. The consequences would be the same, though.

My point there was perfectly valid, if expressed with my usual boorishness and lack of tact.

Most people realized I was trying to make a point about the folly of covering up evil, repugnant ideas in sanitized language. I don't think you missed the point, either, but pretending that you didn't get it was convenient for cementing your prejudices.

So you trolled one of my threads based on a personal vendetta. Your trolling has failed to stop the rest of us from talking about it civilly, so now you have resorted to open character assassination.

The OP of this thread was abrasive against Republicans, yes.

When a broad group of people consistently denounce anyone who supports Barack Obama as "delusional" and call them "Obamabots" without bothering to hear what that person has to say, I feel justified in talking crap about them. I get pretty sick of being spoken of as I were shallow and uneducated entirely because I disagree with someone's political views, especially considering that I bust my ass to keep myself well informed.

The only charges you can bring against Barack Obama are based on lies and ignorance, and I have proven them to be lies and ignorance. I have made a solid case that Barack Obama deserves my enthusiastic support. If you have brought a single charge against Obama's character or the success of his presidency, please feel free to bring it forward, but you have so far failed to construct a credible case for your views.

In fact, the reason you are pissed off at me right now is that I've made a solid case that ignorance and deceit form the entire basis of your political stance.

Which was the dim expectation I had when I posted the OP. It was the reason I opened my OP with a broad castigation of Republicans in general. I started with the intention of opening up a thread discussing the idea that it's okay to take a positive stand on a politician if you really think they've done a good job, but then I started thinking about the fact that I'd been ridiculed or ignored in the past for expressing such ideas. When you so much as dare say something nice about anybody or anything, people act like you've committed some abominable sin or done something horrendously impolite, and Republicans are the worst offenders.

I wanted to buck the idea that I'm somehow obligated to treat Obama as the "lesser of two evils" just because anyone who disagreed with me would declare me mentally unbalanced if I didn't. I have a right to have a differing view on Obama, and I shouldn't be declared "delusional" just because I think he's done a good job. If I want to express a different viewpoint, I ought to be given a chance to bring forward my arguments for my stance before being denounced for it.

The smug bullcrap you pointed out was the reason I felt that anger. What you pointed out is my justification for my feelings of disdain toward Republicans. The smug, careless disdain that you just pointed out is the REASON that I generally hate conservatives and their closed-minded bullcrap. My anger was targeted at people like Bataar and people like Just-me, whom you just tried to paint as representative of the reactions to this thread (I'm probably not the only person who thinks they're useless morons).

However, I was wrong to think that was all I would get, you doubly so:

I must say that my expectations were far more cynical than necessary. People like techstepgenr8tion and a few other conservative and moderate voices have proven themselves more than willing to discuss the matter in terms of legitimate, real-world issues with Obama's presidency. They have brought out valid criticisms. They have made the discussion fun and enlightening.

I can't begin to describe how pleased I am with how this thread has turned out compared to the expectations that influenced some of the unnecessary abrasiveness and cynicism in my OP.

...

...

Then of course there is you.

That's kind of because they actually had been debunked, dude. You might have noticed that nobody has tried to defend you on them.

It explains to me that you trolled a thread that you disagreed with based on a childish personal vendetta.

Agreed. That is the price we're going to pay if we don't straighten up right now and start making some hard choices: we will all suffer, just like what's happening in Greece. We can't just keep hiding forever from the cruel reality that we can't always keep our cake and eat it too.

If you don't want to pay a higher tax, there isn't going to be some miraculous "trickle-down effect" to make up for it. Your tax-cut has to come from somewhere, and it will usually come from people who don't have any means to support themselves. It will come at the expense of some suffering. If you think that it's worth saving a couple of bucks here and there, though, I disagree with you, but that's your lookout.

On the other hand, it's nice that we try to make the lives of the less fortunate in our country as comfortable as we can, but there is a price that we pay for it: it costs money. It is nice to talk about how great it is to make sure there are homes for the homeless and all that. I agree with it. However, if you move into a more prosperous area to try to make a better living and that progressive tax hits you while you're dealing with ultra-large utility bills and a general high cost of living, it hits you hard. It hurts. Don't act like you weren't expecting it because it is the exact same thing that you advocated and fought for.

I'm sorry, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. That ultra-lucrative job that serendipitously rises from the primordial mud of fortune, not asking you to have any special skills or work very hard, is paying so much for a reason: there are a lot of hidden costs, such as a high cost of living in that area or a long commute. Moving up in the world didn't just become some problem-free cakewalk. And then suddenly that progressive tax that you thought was a good idea back when you weren't making very much money comes and bites you in the butt.

If you are one of those liberals who know the worth of everything and the value of nothing, go ahead and become a conservative who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. You might as well trade one folly for another. When you finally do, you will be convinced that suddenly you've figured everything out, and you know so much more than those dumb kids who just haven't seen enough of reality to know better. Sorry, but it's not that easy. Defending your ideals is hard, and giving up on them just because you found out first-hand that its hard only ties in with your earlier assumption that good things are worthwhile and important as long as they're easy and someone else is paying for them. You haven't changed, just your position in society.

@WWD

You misunderstand me; I'm not here now to argue with you, what I'm trying to do is level with you. I didn't come here to troll you, I'm not pissed at you, I wouldn't even say my feelings rise the level of active dislike. I'm offering you an oblique apology, you left a lasting bad taste for me with some of things you've said, and I allowed that to creep into my earlier posts in this thread. For that, I'm sorry, I should have either committed to engaging you on the issues not entered the thread at all. I still think you were out of line back then, but I should have left that animosity back in the originating thread and stuck to the issues at hand.

I'm not lying when I say I initially could not tell if your OP was meant to be completely serious, and then I was irked more by your tone in dismissing criticisms than by anything else. I was torn because on the one hand I have genuine issues with Obama and his presidency and have critiques from both right and left, but I did not want to get bogged down in a protracted source debunking battle, I've been there and done that and it's both a lot of work and fairly pointless.

There's a reason I try and stick to fairly topical sources like columns and news articles; too many people will just Tl;DR if you post something that's dense and informative, you need to toss in some entertainment value or narrative interest to get people to actually read your info. So what you're seeing as a reluctance to defend a shaky position is actually a combination of practicality and laziness; I don't want to put a lot of time into digging up all my sources, vetting them, perhaps excerpting cognizant points and inputting everything into WP with commentary, only to have the whole thing dismissed out of hand. I'll admit I might have misjudged you personally on that score, but it's a hard habit to break when you've been here in PPR as long as I have, especially when one also has a job and a wife that demand attention. I like to write, I don't so much like to play dueling links and source bias whack-a-mole.

Now I'm going to deploy my most feared and hated internet weapon; my advice.

You're a good writer, a gift I like to think we share to some extent. You managed to provoke a visceral reaction in me, not an easy task and beyond most of the mindless drivel that passes for opinions around here. However, your style is maladaptive if your goal is persuasion or discussion rather than venting or rallying people who already agree with you. You do hate really well, I'd venture to say better than anyone else that's posted here in some time. The anger really leaps off the screen, the intensity is incandescent, and clearly both thought and talent went into the crafting. Aside from the obvious ones, there is a long-term downside to that style of posting, namely getting typecast and not taken seriously in other settings. It's easy to get anyone to cheer you on by trashing people they don't like, that's how most talk radio personalities operate, and it has it's place, but it also can create an impression that's hard to shake when you later want to talk constructively.

Look at the way our board's partisans are roundly mocked and ignored, everyone knows what they're going to say before they say it, and that they'll bend reality to promote whatever their "side" is currently pushing. Obama caused the housing crisis? W staged the 9/11 attacks? Bill Clinton had people killed to cover up his Arkansas drug running? Partisans will believe and push even crazier things if they think it will help their agenda, and once they're identified as such their credibility to anyone but each other is completely shot. The same thing can happen with the rage posting, it can make it hard for people to see through the anger and examine what you're actually trying to say. Pretty soon you're "rage boy", that angry guy who's ranting can safely be ignored and is easily dismissed, if you're lucky enough to avoid the ban-hammer.

This advice should be familiar to PPR regulars, but I'd highly recommend putting away the cudgel and picking up a knife, if you get my drift. A club is a heavy, unwieldy device that delivers a lot of force over a wide area, but you have to swing it very hard and it's not terribly precise, not to mention everyone sees it coming and it's not exactly subtle. A knife on the other hand, must be directed to exactly where you want it and takes a bit more practice to master, but focuses all the energy on a very narrow area, doesn't need so much force behind it to be effective, and doesn't accidentally take out bystanders who get in the way. Stick a (rhetorical) knife in someone who deserves it and people are thrilled; club a wide path with a mass generalization and you make as many enemies as friends, maybe more depending on the specifics.

To continue the martial analogy, you can't physically attack your ideological foes, you can't beat them into submission, you can't permanently remove them from the battlefield, etc. You'll wear yourself out trying, and possibly draw a ban in the effort if you get overzealous. What you need to do is knock the ground out from underneath them, destroy their positions when they show their faces, maintain your own flexibility if presented with genuinely new information, and do it all in such a manner that passersby don't think you're an ogre clubbing a baby seal. That means being specific, being persuasive, being credible, and being likable the whole time.

The keys to likability here are apologizing when you realize you've done wrong, being gracious in victory (allowing an out helps a lot here), being willing to change an opinion and admit to it, and a good dose of self deprecation (I think you've got that one down). Other than that, minimizing things like hyperbole (aspies tend to see it as lying), naked assertions, mass generalizations and unwarranted surety (comes across as arrogance) are also pluses.

So there you have it, an apology, a ton of original thought, and my deadly political writing advice, all in one messy off-topic post. That's my hatchet, I'm imploring you to bury it.

Bet you didn't see that one coming...

I know how to find original source documents, as I have shown repeatedly.

I don't like entertainment value. I am a desiccated scholar. I choose to bludgeon myself with arcane and dull reading material because I feel that it has superior substance. It sort of figures into my "hair shirt" complex.

Do you realize that, when Inuyasha or anyone else posts a link, I go to it and read it in its entirety? I even try to do him justice, which is more than a lot of people around here would do. I'm even nice to him in his discussions about Gingrich, on which he isn't nearly as brazenly dishonest as on some more partisan issues.

As excuses go, I am not unarmed or without ammunition: for example, I took a calculus final yesterday. I had started out flunking the course badly because of the fact that math has never been a strong suit for me, but I have pressed myself on it to the point that I made 99% on my last test, an effort that puts me under sufficient pressure as to drive me to emotional meltdowns. Yesterday afternoon, I was physically ill purely from stress, suffering from severe flu-like symptoms, painful cramps, and sinus inflammation that was so intense that I was spitting up blood. On top of that, I have to contend with the demands of a boyfriend, and I can assure you from first-hand experience that men can be every bit as neurotic and needy in a relationship as a woman. Finally, I have a variety of Tourettes that is associated with severe and traumatizing rage attacks.

I can play the "excuse" game too. Like most of them, I can play it at a fairly high skill level. Excuses are still another kind of bullcrap, though. I never required you to devote all that much time to defending your claims. You could very well have stated in crisp English that you were short on time and chosen to focus on one of those claims, even just PART of one of those claims, and generated a perfectly valid, well-supported argument for it.

You know me: I would have adjusted my position based on it...because one thing I do respect is a valid argument.

Hmm...neither, really. I just like generating good material and doing good research, and I see these feuds as a pretext for doing so.

When I encounter someone who uses brazen lies and distortions to advance an agenda, if I want to persuade anybody, I want to persuade others that this person deserves to be tarred, feathered and carried out on a rail. The hate and anger are pretty real. I do not require affectation or device in order to facilitate it.

I am prepared to let bygones be bygones unconditionally.

Dox47, I can safely say he has not calmed down, in fact he personally attacked me twice in one post. First calling me a ret*d and then calling me a racist.

Inuyasha wrote:

Consider the source.

That was out of line there, but he did apologize later in the thread. I'm starting to see the pattern in his posts where he says something that's outrageous, only to walk it back later when he's calmed down a bit. Ideally the insults wouldn't happen in the first place, but since we're all Aspies here I'm inclined to cut slack in most cases. Bottom line for me right now is that WWD is usually interesting, and PPR can always use interesting people.

What he gave me was a nonapology/apology, I wasn't born yesterday and he didn't walk it back until I called him out on it.

Hey Delaney, what do you make of this controversy over Plan B pills? I think it's sort of no win for Obama, he's either offending the progressives by meddling in reproductive health and overruling science for religion, or he's blatantly playing politics and offending people who don't like being manipulated. I'd liken it to John Kerry's hunting trips; no one was fooled and people felt like their intelligence was being insulted. What's your take?