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[Toady One]

It wasn't just this thread.  It has been a growing pattern, over and over.  It's always been a thing, one we could cope with, but it has gotten much worse recently.

[Reelya]

I have criticized elements of the left before, but I would never say they were the biggest perveyors of bigotry.

However, elements of the left do get away with saying some fairly outlandishly prejudiced things, e.g. gender-based insults that would never be tolerated for the other gender.

as an example, there's a bunch of data of sexual abuse of males by females, when it's brought up, I've personallly seen feminists trot out every argument against the data, with exactly the cliches you normally associated with full-blown rape apologetics. So ... if feminists are grasping for a way to dismiss some victimization data when it doesn't suit their narrative and they just happen to think up the exact same rape apologetics arguments then you have to think the thought process of feminist rape apologists and non-feminist rape apologists is exactly the same.

[hector13]

You monsters! /s

Never knew he'd been warned for that stuff, but it makes sense really. His positions tended to be odd ones, and he often appeared to be moving the goalposts throughout debates, which I found to be hugely frustrating at times.

It also appeared that he sometimes deliberately took controversial positions which he refused to be moved from, seeming a bit troll-y.

[Aklyon]

He did seem to be fond of being on the other side of an argument on purpose sometimes.

[Trekkin]

He did seem to be fond of being on the other side of an argument on purpose sometimes.

And of having wildly inconsistent standards for what arguments and evidence he would consider valid. I didn't know if he was trolling or just didn't know at all how argumentation worked.

[smjjames]

I genuinely thought that some of that was just personality, though his behavior did get worse recently.

Pivoting back towards politics stuff

Trump had apparently asked Sessions to drop the case against Arpaio several months ago (he didn't, AFAIK). I thought it was mainly a state based case, and a former Obama adviser said that doing so is the kind of thing that people get impeached over.

[hector13]

Well we had him all but admit he tried to influence the FBI investigation(s) and nothing happened there.

[smjjames]

It'll take more than just that to convince the Republicans that they need to impeach him. They'll try to keep him around as long as possible so that they can get their agenda done, which isn't much so far.

[sluissa]

Wrote a post, deleted it because I'm angry and it would be unwise post something from this mindset.

Suffice to say I disagree with what happened to Neo.

I'll just take a while to fume over it.

[smjjames]

At this point the biggest obstacle to the Republican agenda is Republicans. Trump so far hasn't even been useful as what they want him to be- a yes man.

They'd have the same yes man in place with Pence.

Even with Pence in place, they'd still be their own biggest obstacle. He'd certainly be less disruptive, but more effective? No idea. He's been working with Congress a lot over the healthcare stuff and even his efforts didn't seem to help.

[Trekkin]

At this point the biggest obstacle to the Republican agenda is Republicans. Trump so far hasn't even been useful as what they want him to be- a yes man.

They'd have the same yes man in place with Pence.

Even with Pence in place, they'd still be their own biggest obstacle. He'd certainly be less disruptive, but more effective? No idea. He's been working with Congress a lot over the healthcare stuff and even his efforts didn't seem to help.

He's also not ideologically what they need right now; he's more a Dominionist than even most of their evangelical base, and it's entirely possible that his priorities are sufficiently different from the GOP norm (or the Tea Party norm) to make him a less attractive prospect than Trump legislationally.

I mean, you can get Trump to commit to a forever war in Afghanistan by showing him a photo of Afghan women in miniskirts. Pence would just declare war on miniskirts instead.

[smjjames]

I mean, you can get Trump to commit to a forever war in Afghanistan by showing him a photo of Afghani women in miniskirts. Pence would just declare war on miniskirts instead.

You heard about that too? Heh, I think it was to try and prove to him that Afghanistan was a progressive nation once, then again, girls in miniskirts.

[Frumple]

Trump had apparently asked Sessions to drop the case against Arpaio several months ago (he didn't, AFAIK). I thought it was mainly a state based case, and a former Obama adviser said that doing so is the kind of thing that people get impeached over.

At least this latest bit, it wasn't so much being a mainly state based case as there being a state-level case and an only somewhat connected federal one. Probably some other stuff going on, too, because hell, it's arpaio, totemic incarnation of some of the threads of corruption and malfeasance laced through our law enforcement systems.

Haven't paid the most attention to the fiddly bits detail wise (and my head's doing its usual these days, so what I did didn't stick around too well), doubt that'll change until something else happens on that front. Civil litigation starts rolling in, guy ends up behind bars for crimes against the state, somethin' like that.

[Trekkin]

Ryan has publicly disagreed with Trump's decision.

It's not the first time the Speaker has disagreed with Trump, but it's telling that his office is increasingly uninterested in equivocating about it.

[Reelya]

Just saying he was too tough on immigrants misses the main point about Arpaio ... that guy was building gulags that sound like they belong in Stalinist Russia not the USA. e.g. the time they put a prostitute in an iron cage in the desert sun, refused to give her water, and she died.

Not to mention how he faked crime charges against his political enemies in city hall. Man, the guy is serious bad news and you really want to punish people like that just so others don't get the idea that they can get away with what he did. Seriously he's the type of person you read about in Solzhenitsyn's accounts of Stalinist-era politburo officers.