U.S. Police Have Shot Dead 385 People In Five Months

[Indy]

[Philly]

Indy - if all these guys care about is keeping their guns then we can at least say that they succeed at that and are ready to put up major fight against anyone who tries to make it otherwise. You brag about being a gun owner yourself yet you do nothing with yours EXCEPT brag about it. It's fine to own a gun just cause you like having it. It's actually preferable that people own guns for that reason above any others. But don't you see the irony in you deriding those who organize politically to keep their guns as that's their major issue, and meanwhile you do absolutely nothing about the issues you say they should care about?

I'm not by any means saying you should go use your gun on a banker or try to overthrow Floridas government but how are you fighting back against this stuff in any manner at all? If you aren't doing anything to stop the injustices you see then who are you to judge those who want to fight for the issues that matter to them?

[exploited]

I hadn't looked at this thread since yesterday. Check it tonight and lol.

[eynon81]

[Philly]

[eynon81]

damn Philly.

[Philly]

I mean, I don't really think this is a new observation, non. In our two party system, the Democrats are the more left of the two, but we all know they're much more centrist than than their counterparts a few generations ago. I think you yourself said that Obama is to the right of Nixon and George Bush Sr.

In our system, it's easy to say we're getting more liberal or more conservative based on which party is winning elections as of late. But to really measure what direction things are going, I think you can almost completely ignore who is winning elections and instead compare each party to themselves a decade or two ago. You do that, and you see what direction we are really headed. The Democrats have gone further right (by becoming centrists), and so have the Republicans (by becoming more conservative).

Now, conservatism offers some amount of (don't hate me, I'm not a SJW) privilege,because it is inherently less threatening and subversive to the dominant culture. After all, conservatism is about maintaining tradition and the status quo (or at least a status quo that existed in recent memory), so conservatives don't evoke fear of a radical other the way extreme progressives might. What we're talking about - as you've alluded to many times in this thread - are middle class white guys from rural and suburban settings. So when the whole 60's/70's social revolution came to a close, my sense (without having lived through it) is that American society largely remembered something along the lines of these cliffnotes:

1. The blacks got their rights already, ok, whatever but stay away from my daughter.
2. Those damn hippies spit on American soldiers.
3. Those damn hippies need to get jobs.
4. Those damn hippies were sympathetic to the damn commies.
5. I'm still scared of the damn commies.
6. This Reagan guy reminds me of a time when I wasn't scared of damn commies.
7. Weed is pretty good though. Let's just berate two more generations of Americans for using it and then be cool about it.

Clearly, this is a stacked deck, culturally speaking, and one that creates the branding problem I talked about earlier for the left.

The left never rebounded from the image problems that came out of their 60's stint, and subsequently have been asked to sit quietly while the adults (centrists) do the talking - hey, would you prefer the Republicans? Didn't think so.

Meanwhile, the right, if you notice, never talks about radical change or social revolution. Only restoring the good old days of yore. Their battle cry is "Take back our country!". They've carved out a niche that allows them to be much more extreme, because even if it's perception and not reality, the perception is that they only want to restore what worked so well in the past. Of course, the left is winning on the social issues front, but that's inevitable, and those victories fuel enough resentment on the right to hold a coalition of bible thumpers, gun humpers and businessmen together around a much more extremist platform.

So when a bunch of pudgy, middle-aged white guys in the southwest show up with guns to stop the feds from taking some guy's cows, the conservative establishment shrugs and asks their consultants how this can be parlayed into turning out the base. But when a bunch of young black guys in Baltimore start rioting because of systemic police brutality, the liberal establishment wants to know how these malcontents can be quelled while also kept at an arms length - preferably more.

[Libertarian602]

[eynon81]

[eynon81]

astute as f**k Indy, but isn't this all a failure among the leadership of the left? millennials and gen Y out-number boomers now and our revolution was a conservative one. true we don't have the money of the boomers, but as the early part of the '08 democratic primary showed we have the votes.

I used to be a conservative, but history marched on without me....I saw us wage war for no reason and I saw wall-street bring our country to the economic brink. I'm still pissed off, but the only activism on the Left (aside from my own little working criminal justice nitch, which has support on the right as well) seems to be for bull-shit SJW causes.


shit's gonna get weird when Rand Paul gets the republican nomination.