So a poll means support even though you guys say you can vote anyone except Trump. So the hundreds of people voting agai8nst Trump, meant they were lying? Everyone supported Joe Biden all along, never wanted sanders or anybody else, according to you, everyone voted democrat to supported Joe Biden. That is what a poll means to you and most of the people on this board. There were hundreds of posts saying they would vote anybody against Trump...but that is impossible according to you, it has to be a vote of support. I have yet to see anyone show an actual post where I stated I supported Trump, just a poll asking who I would vote for...but I want to vote anti democratic party. Just like most of you who vote anti Republican no matter who they are. But you guys now conflate that to support....why? Why be so intellectually dishonest?
You guys let your denizens post page after page about the pandemic in the Trump thread. Post after post after post...but that means nothing to Trump's approval? Then why are they posted day after day, responded to by people like you. It should go in the pandemic thread because that's what those posts are about. But you guys respond and post about it day after day as if it means something about Trump. If it means nothing about his approval , why is it posted there and responded to by people like you, day after day?
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So a poll that gives a choice of vote for or against is your proof I support someone? That is it. It can't be that I would never vote democratic party. I mean you guys can posts hundreds of posts about voting anyone but Trump, but the opposite can't be true?
So if there was a poll that asked if I could go back in time, would I kill Hitler before he rose to power, and I answered no, do I support Hitler? If you can snap answer that with a yes, you know little about European History.
Trump added to the pandemic problem. There are other idiots who made the pandemic worse but Trump's the only one with his own megathread because he did many stupid things on top of the pandemic.
The poll specifically asks if you will vote for Trump's re-election. You answered "Yes".
It doesn't ask if you're conservative. Or Republican. Or about their policies. Or which Democrat candidates you dislike. Or which policies you dislike.
The poll is entirely unambiguous.
Why bring time travel and killing people into it? Let's just talk voting.
If you were Weimar citizen voting in the 1930 election, or either of the 1932 elections (I don't care which, just setting the stage), and you voted for the Nazi Party and thus Hitler, then that would make you a supporter of Hitler. It would make you at a minimum a Nazi supporter, and frankly, historians would just simplify that right down to "Nazi", because that's what the term means.
If you voted for Hitler, that would be unequivocal proof you were a Nazi, yes. It doesn't matter why you became a Nazi; there is no "but it's okay for me to be a Nazi because X" argument to be made. You're just a Nazi, like any of the other Nazis. Voting "against" the Weimar Republic because you're concerned about the workers and the direction the Republic was taking, and choosing to do so by voting for the Nazi Party? You're a Nazi. That's what the word means. In this "what-if" hypothetical.
That's how voting works. You didn't vote against Biden. You didn't vote against the Democrats in general. You voted for Trump. That's an objective, definitive, official statement of your support for that candidate.
You supported Trump. Objectively, definitively, by your own admission.
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Also;
I have literally never in my life ever voted anti-Republican. I've never voted against a candidate, ever. Not only has that literally never been an option on any ballot, because ballots ask you to vote for a candidate, even conceptually, I never chose who I voted for based on who their opposition was. Not ever, in any election, at any level, in my life.
Stop projecting your own malfeasance onto others, when you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
Last edited by Endus; 2021-08-03 at 01:40 PM.
There's nothing wrong with voting against a candidate.
I voted against Steven Harper. I chose the Liberals because I thought they had the best chance of winning.
I voted against the Premier of my province because he's a run of the mill conservative who will (and did) slash healthcare funding. The opposition were fucking idiots.
I voted against the Mayor of my city because he once floated the idea of getting rid of property taxes in favour of increased sales tax. Again the opposition were idiots and I voted for whoever was polling better.
The US is still a two party system mostly. Loudly proclaiming how much you hate the opposition is irrelevant when the guy you did vote for is a clown who got tens of thousands of people killed.
Trump's approval rating overall? On the virus? If it's the former, we've covered that. If it's the latter, remember that time he mused about injecting people with sunshine and bleach? That was a good time, I got more if you want them.
No, they're about the political element of the pandemic, which isn't relevant for that thread which is about covid. It was discussing the political/policy failures of the Trump administration, which is something we're doing less with Biden since his administration is not failing as miserably.
Discussing national policy. Discussing him arguing and disagreeing with his own experts. Discussing how he risked infecting USSS agents for a drive-by for his fans. Discussing how he knew the virus was serious while publicly downplaying the threat of the virus. Discussing the lives lost due to a failed federal and many federal state responses before the vaccine, and how he continues to not really push the vaccine now despite being vaccinated himself.
I mean, if you actually read along without taking personal offense because we were shit talking Trump (literally nobody believes you don't/didn't support him) you'd have caught all this. But complaining about it in the Biden thread is kinda silly.
You've come here to do that, and people disagreed.
One would think the crap state of American infrastructure and social services and the ensuing social and economic problems that causes is demonstrative of why bitching about "handouts" is missing the point.
It is not a handout. It is a social investment by the state; America has gotten extremely bad at investing in itself and is now paying the price by increasingly resembling the late Soviet Union.
Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
The other fun fact that people of that political stripe like to conveniently forget is that it's not solely a matter of how much money is being spent - which is why "reminding" people that the US spends proportionately similar amounts to other countries in a given area is also missing the point.
The US might spend the same or more, but the difference is that unlike in other countries most of that spending goes towards privatized analogues of shit which is publicly run in other countries; rather than a near 50/50 split of public to private investment, it's more like 20/80 in the case of the US. And because the private sector calculates their price tags as a function of profit rather than simply how much it costs to provide X service, each dollar the US spends is markedly less effective than one spent in Canada or the EU.
Another devil in this particular equation is that the US engages in large infrastructure projects far less frequently than elsewhere, so additional waste is created in having to rebuild the organizational capital every single time a new program comes up. This is partially why NASA has gotten so bad at spending money compared to the Apollo Era - every new project requires reinventing the wheel.
They really don't see the irony in insisting that the military needs to keep building tanks that never get used so as to not cause knowledge attrition but don't think to apply the same to any other form of public spending.
Last edited by Elegiac; 2021-08-03 at 11:06 PM.
Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
Most of the damage to roads around here is to the surface, the roadbed is not generally in bad shape until you get to either really old or remote roads (which are often one and the same). I am well aware (and have agreed) that we need to repair about half the roads in the US.
Make long distance trucks actually pay for the damage they cause, problem solved.
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Depends on how much your company pays for.
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I have nothing against appropriate government infrastructure spending, nor am I against actually needed social assistance. I am against thinking it should come easily to individuals that have done little to address it themselves.
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I don't agree with tax breaks for the wealthy, I do not like giving money away with nothing in exchange no matter who is getting it. I dont really like deductions for anyone for that matter. You make X you should pay Y.
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We are not in danger of totally losing much in the way of civilian infrastructure industrial base or know-how.
That's nice, you've yet to justify such a viewpoint and seem to think repeating it makes it factual.
Which is manifestly untrue when you compare how out of practice the US is when it comes to any infrastructural project compared to countries that do it regularly. That is why it takes longer, costs more, and the end result is usually of worse quality.We are not in danger of totally losing much in the way of civilian infrastructure industrial base or know-how.
To say nothing of, again, the fact that most of the money is eaten up by the profit motive which is the definition of inefficiency.
Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
Not really unless you're of the opinion that reducing hardship is a bad thing.
A difference which isn't relevant to the fact the US is bad at infrastructure because such projects are ad hoc versus countries which regularly engage in it. Lol.There is a significant difference between not having surge capacity and not having any capacity.
No one's interested in pedantry.
Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi