The Right Side of the News

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Trump has committed no violations of the Constitution or the law or anything else, but Hillary did, the FBI did, Joe and Hunter Biden did, others on the Left did, the Democrats of the House lled and lled and lled.

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Trump definitely abused his powerM and certainly engaged in his usual obstruction of justice. the GAO ruled that he exceeded his power. There is no doubt about that. Of the others, the few violations that have been shown are minor. And you really haven’t shown that Biden broke the law.The Democrats in the House did not lie. That was you and the Republicans. As usual you call truths you want suppressed lies - one of those nasty little habits that exposes your true allegiance.

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I realize by now that there is no point in discussing any of this.

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More accurately you can’t discuss it. You lie and you lie and you lie and then complain when you aren’t believed.

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Part of that is my fault, I don't do enough research and that isn't going to improve, partly from sheer discouragement with the results though...

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The results are bad for you because you oppose the truth, and obviously so. Just looking for evil lies won’t help you. We don’t love them the way you do.

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.... and the political divide is simply unbridgeable.

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And that’s your tribalism right there.

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I don't see any way to fix the problem.

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You are the problem, your irrationality, your tribalism, your love of slander.. I don’t see much hope of fixing that after all these years. Christianity claims to have a solution. Maybe you should try it.

Apparently Trump wants Pence to take charge of the coronavirus response because of his handling of an HIV outbreak in Indiana.So, completely unnecessary outbreaks and deaths - but he can be eventually pressured into taking some action. Not exactly a recommendation on my book, but maybe Trump thinks it is.

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A doctor on some show or other said what Trump was doing, or actually Pence I think, was exactly what was needed to deal with the situation. But I had to hear that as a sound bite on one of my conservative talk shows, not the sort of thing you'd ever hear on the mainstream media

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Have you considered that if you have to go to biased and unreliable sources to hear something, it probably isn’t true?For example Ars Technica

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Oh and the Doctor said Pence was the right man for the job because of how he handled the HIV situation in his own state.

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Refusing to do anything about it until he was pressured into taking action ? I already covered that Message 5100Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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Trump was already taking action to protect us from the virus way back at the beginning of January, by refusing to let some people into the country from places where the virus was spreading

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I guess that you live refusing to let people into the country but that’s hardly the only precaution to take, and decimating the CDC was probably not a good idea.

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All the way back in early January while he was being subjected to the partisan impeachment that dominated the news.

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Which was partisan only because the Republicans are - almost all - fine when one of their own abuses power.

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I think it's fairly recent that he appointed Pence but I'm not sure about the timing.

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It was Thursday. It was in the news.

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In any case he wasn't pressured into anything. That's fake news.

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Pence needed to be pressured into allowing needle exchange programs. Let’s hope he isn’t equally bad with coronavirus.

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Oh and speaking of biased sources, I stay away from the mainstream media because I know *they* are biased. The conservatives aren't biased in a way that affects their ability to be objective.

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By which you mean that you prefer them because they are more biased and less objective.

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The CDC was not decimated.

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Really ? In 2018 the Trump administration fired the pandemic response team and they haven’t been replaced. And he cut the CDC’s funding for controlling potential pandemics in other countries - which could stop them before they reach the US.

At CPAC, Glenn Beck says the Bernie Sanders revolution will lead to another Holocaust (Media Matters)Let’s not forget that Bernie Sanders is Jewish.

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The Democrats ARE a socialist party these days. I'm sure there are Democrats out there who aren't but they just haven't wised up to it yet.

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If they were, Joe Biden wouldn’t be leading the race to take on Trump.

Sorry, but everyone near the centre is a communist is just silly.

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Was pondering this extreme polarization that is continually in evidence here on almost any subject at all, as if there are actually two different kinds of brains involved.

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Well, your brain is the sort that labels anyone who doesn’t support Trump as a leftist. Even a right-wing extremist. The sort of brain that jumps from a man claiming that he hasn’t eaten in 66 years to the idea that he is a demon-possessed corpse without any consideration of the alternatives. The sort of brain that says it’s normal for the President to ignore all the usual channels and send his personal lawyer in to demand investigations of daft conspiracy theories (but only if he’s a Republican - if he’s a Democrat you’d be making up stuff to make it look even worse)

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It gets expressed of course as insults and I suppose it would be hard to get off that mode of expression, but I'm truly amazed at how the Left thinks. It really is like you're all from some other planet.

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You mean a planet where obviously false right-wing propaganda isn’t automatically believed. That’s this one.

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I can suppose the Sixties Leftists who pretty much run the universities are the basic cause but I'm not satisfied with that explanation

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I’d suggest that actually thinking is a rather more important part of it. It doesn’t take much to notice that the Democratic Party has a range of views and that the establishment Democrats are well to the right of Bernie Sanders. Who isn’t a communist.

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I'm sure you all have a similar point of view about the Right.

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The difference is that we have real evidence.

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We'll just call each other idiots and ignoramuses and no light will be shed on the essence of the difference as usual.

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I think that my points above shed considerable light on the matter. You won’t accept that, though because you don’t like the truth.

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Yup, so much for that discussion.

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And thus I am proven correct. Unable to refute any of my points you just reject them because they contradict your fantasy. As I predicted.

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In this discussion I'm not interested in refutation, certainly not right off the bat. I'm interested in understanding why we think so differently, and comparing the different points of view

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But you only want an answer you’d like - and the truth isn’t it. You don’t want the irrationality, the prejudice or the tribalism in your thinking exposed.

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And it probably requires a modicum of respect for the opposing point of view.

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It certainly requires a respect for the facts. And it seems you don’t have that. Try these facts. The Democratic Party contains a range of views. The establishment Democrats are centrist. They are opposing the left-wing candidates like Sanders.

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But what I have in mind is clearly not going to happen with you

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If what you have in mind is genuine understanding it isn’t going to happen with you. Not unless you’re prepared change and to accept the facts.

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I hate your point of view just as much as you hate mine, I can say I despise it, I abhor it, I don't understand how any human being can think the way Leftists think.

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You’re too busy hating us to understand. And too proud to acknowledge the problems in your own thinking even when they are blindingly obvious. You’re only proving my point - the biggest problem is you.

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If all you want to do is continue to trade such opinions...

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Much of what I am saying is fact, not opinion. Can’t you even acknowledge that ?

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...then there is no way to have a different kind of discussion about it as I was pondering might be possible.

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And it isn’t possible because you refuse to be reasonable. That’s on you.

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I don't think the "minority" CAN behave as a mob, I don't see how they have "control of the government" in any situation.

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Sure they can. If they rig the system through gerrymandering and voter suppression - and get an advantage through the Electoral College the Republicans can get the Presidency and both Houses of Congress, all with a minority of voters (and a smaller proportion of the electorate). And that’s what they want.

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I'm sure there is another point of view about all that but I'm not in position to argue it. All I'd say in response is that the Electoral College is not the problem you are talking about

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The Electoral College decides the Presidency, and a minority vote did win it. If that is added to control of Congress by a minority there is a very serious problem. At the least the issues I raise are important context.And there are obvious problems with the Electoral College.
, such as the winner-takes-all States. Not to mention the interesting fact that one of the reasons it was chosen was because of slavery - where the South had a large population without voting rights. If things had been otherwise the Founders might have decided differently.I think there is at least a case for insisting that each State’s Electors are divided proportionately instead of winner-takes-all, which would make every State worth some effort.

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You wanted to know myh source. It's the same source from Wikipedia that you quote. The way I read it, simply to call certain ideas Marxist or COmmunist etc. is "red baiting" which sounds to me like a way of saying that kind of thing is wrong which to me sounds like a form of censorship.

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Then you aren’t reading it correctly (what a surprise). It’s about calling people or groups Marxist or Communist in order to discredit them (whether it is true or not). And you are a fan of real censorship anyway.

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Seems to me that sometimes the charge of committing a "logical fallacy" can really be a form of censorship, a kind of intellectual intimidation that simply discredits otherwise valid opinion.

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I suppose it can be used as an attempt to discredit opinions, but not when it is used correctly to point out that an argument is flawed. Of course the abuse often comes from Christian apologists.But calling an argument a logical fallacy is certainly better than calling an idea Communist to discredit it. So if you really believed that you would have to say that red-baiting is a form of censorship.And in this case simply calling someone a Marxist or Communist without any regard for the truth - solely to demonise them - is much worse than a valid opinion.

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And of course in this case it would have a political motive, a dangerous political motive in my opinion..

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It’s pretty obvious that it’s the demonisation of opponents that has the dangerous political motive - not the opposition to it.