Commenter Archive

Orange County engineers seem to be very Republican. Bay Area and Seattle engineers not so much.

I'm a liberal but I don't think the GOP is going anywhere.

You are right that they are might be dying a slow demographic death but it is a very slow death. One that could last my entire lifetime or more.

I grew up in a Congressional district that is as blue as they get. Most of my friends are young, educational professionals who are proud Democratic voters. However as Tod noted in his Value Voters summit posts, there are a lot of young people who are very right-wing. Some will leave, many will not. Recently, a home-schooler came out with a book in which he proclaims "Shock! shock!" at how much sex happened at Yale while he was a student at said Ivy League.

To be fair, Bloomberg only became a Republican because he knew that there was a snowball's chance in hell of him winning the Democratic nod. NYC Democratic politics is still very much a bottom up kind of thing. You start at the ground and work your way up.

There is also nothing in Bloomberg's record that would make the national Republican party happy even when he had an R next to his name.

I am going to just sign on to this in concurrence.

I applaud and thank you for going and reporting so I don't have to. I think I would have stormed out after a minute. Possibly less.

Some thoughts and observations:

1. There is no contradiction between Evangelical Christianity and their support for Israel. In their worldview, Israel needs to be reborn and the second Temple rebuilt before Christ can return and the events in Revelations can take place. My general thoughts on this as a liberal Jewish supporter of Israel are "With friends like Michelle Bachmann, Israel does not need Hamas." I also think that the alliance between Jewish neocons and Christian Evangelicals has to be one of the most cynical in political history. I would love to see Bill Kristol's inner-thoughts on Christian Evangelicals. I imagine it is not pretty or kind.

2. I think you hit the nail on the head for different language. I have no idea what conservatives mean when they talk about freedom and liberty. Their definition is not anything that I can recognize as a liberal. Also how are they supposed to accomplish all their far reaching social policy ideas with a "small government"?

Interestingly, as an arts and humanities person, I am largely a conservative/skeptic when it comes to technology.

Not in the anti-Vaccine kind of way but I don't think we are properly analyzing how technological change and automation are hurting people. We can't make jobs redundant and then moralize when people don't have money to pay the bills.

I am also a bit cynical on kickstarter. Largely because of the tyranny of popularity and how it might damage truly challenging art. Kickstarter is not going to crowdsource Two or Three Things I Know About Her

And thanks for the compliment!!

Jokes are not funny when you have to telegraph that they are jokes.

I wasn't here then. He could have been. I have no idea.

I also was not here during the time of Cheeks. I gathered from Erik's thread that he was a super-right wing troll.

I can guarantee that I am no troll and no right-winger.

I like the parts of Berkeley and Cambridge that earn it that nickname very much and would not trade them for all the stars in the universe.

I mean it as an endearing joke as proud resident of San Francisco and the Bay Area* and a fan of the city of Cambridge. I know many residents who use those terms with equal endearment. And I am a rather liberal person.

*Though I will always be a New Yorker in my heart.

The statement was callous and I apologize. But this is a tricky issue and I don't think we should have a risk free military.

I will be very scared for the time when nations can conduct wars remotely via drones.

It is horrible that hundreds and thousands of young men and women can be sent to harm's way at the whims and fancies of their elders. Most of whom are chickenhawks but I think that this is one of the few things that keeps war from getting out of hand. Combat should be difficult and bloody and make us think twice about fighting. Drones do not do that. Drones remove the very real, human cost to war. They getting close to the precipice of Orwellian thoughts of "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" and "Two Minutes of Hate"

Yes a ground invasion would lead to many more U.S. deaths and there will be many more Americans who lose loved ones. This is sad, there is no doubt about it but I think fewer civilians would be put in harm's way. A properly trained soldier is still a human being. They might react under stress and make mistakes but they can also make judgment calls and differentiate between civilian and combatant.

Hopefully.

The real issue is that we should not really be having a lot of these "wars" in the first place.

I am not an isolationist but we need a foreign policy that is based a lot less on military action and we need to end the perpetual war of the last 11 years.

Does the US really need to go after every Jihadi?

And how about the children killed by drones? Did those civilians do anything to deserve death? The answer is no. When you enlist for military service, there is a chance of being sent to combat and killed. This is just the nature of the beast. If you don't want that risk, don't sign up. We have a volunteer military.

The Middle East Civilians did not sign up for anything especially the children.

I don't want soldiers to die but the lives of non-combatants are important. We can't tell them tough luck.

And by very blue I mean places in the Bay Area like San Francisco and the People's Republic of Berkeley. Possibly the People's Republic of Cambridge. Not New York City districts.

I agree that drones are the genie in the bottle and are not going back in.

Drones are massively unpopular. The problem is that the alternative to drones would also be massively unpopular.

All in all, military issues are a great failure of Democracy. IIRC, there is large bipartisan support for massive reductions in military spending. Democrats, Republicans, and Independents support cutting the military budget by anywhere between 40-60 percent. Yet, the Republicans always seem willing to raise the defense budget and everyone else is too scared to make this a talking point. Maybe a few Democrats in very blue districts* would make it an issue but not much beyond that.

This is another reason for needing severe campaign finance reform. It is clear that the lobbying money of the Defense Industry wins above all. One can also be cynical and argue that the military has also become an employeer of semi-last resort for many young people. It is probably better to enlist than have a life in fast food service be your only option. Though the military promises to give skills to many people and probably does not. This American Life did a story about life on an aircraft carrier many years ago. One of the people they interviewed had a job of just servicing the vending machines on the aircraft carriers. That is all he did for 12 hours, fill up vending machines with snacks and soft drinks. What skills is he developing? What is he going to do once his service is up?

I did not mean to imply that women were not argumentative. Any miscommunication on this my bad and I am sorry.

My main point is that a lot of people think that law students all want to be litigators and love trial stuff and this is not true. There are a lot of people in law school who love litigation but they are more of a good-sized minority. Most of my classmates, male and female, hated litigation and the required moot court work.

This was probably an unnecessary point to make but I'm one of the people who want to do trial work from my class, so I wanted to argue. :)

This raises the question about what happens when consensus cannot be reached.

There are probably a lot of issues on which we can reach consensus but do not. However, there are also a lot of issues like gay marriage on which there is no middle ground. You are either for gay marriage or against it. I think half-way measures like domestic partnerships are really just piss-poor stop gap measures that do not give homosexuals full civil rights.

The same is true for a lot of hot-button culture issues: evolution and sex ed in schools, etc.

Now this raises the question of whether men are more likely to be hardline ideological (on the left and the right) and see fewer avenues or areas where consensus is possible.

" I don’t buy this thing about “women don’t like arguing.” I like arguing. Women now make up a majority of law students. Maybe not all women do, but some of my most forceful comments are from women."

Most law students (of all major genders) have an absolute loathing for litigation. I can't tell you how many law students I met who just want to do transactional law (liking filing patents and trademarks and other government stuff) because it means not really interacting with people. Most lawyers can have entire careers without stepping into courtrooms.

There are a lot of people who do want to do trial work but there is still a faint air of stigma around it because the best ways to get trial work are through criminal defense and/or plaintiff's law. Not the most respected parts of the legal profession.

I sort of have an interesting generational inbetween take on the gig economy.

At 31, I am kind of in the purgatory between Gen X and the Millennials. This means I know a lot of people with old school traditional type jobs of salary, health insurance, and vacation. I also know a lot of young people who seem either resigned or absolutely fanatical believers in the new gig/freelance economy. Maybe a lot of it is bravado but many people in their early 20s seem to think that gigging and lateral moves is going to be their existence. Meanwhile people my age seem to have more despair at the old system going away.

I think beyond universal healthcare, we will need some kind of universal vacation policy like Europe has. As a long but steadily employed temp myself, I am scared to take a vacation.

That seems to be the case

As a proud graduate of a small liberal arts college (and as a drama major), I give you my applause. Not only that I went to the kind of liberal arts college that lacked practical majors like nursing, business, engineering, etc.

I think that there are a lot of people who miss the idea that education is not necessarily about economic utility. The point of education is to develop and enhance knowledge, curiosity, critical writing and thinking skills, compassion, curiosity, and a thirst for knowledge and learning.

When people say stuff like "What are you going to do with a history, music, drama, renaissance studies, etc degree?" I see it as being the product of a small imagination.

That being said, we can't ask a huge chunk of our population to go into massive debt for the sake of getting an education and then discovering that they have a hard time getting jobs. A mass educated society is a positive good but it needs to be affordable and not create a crushing despair at loan debt.

2000 was the first Presidential election, I could vote in and was a college junior at the time. This is what I remember.

1. Students arguing about Gore v. Nader and whether the Democratic and Republican Partys were the same. This got strong sometimes.

2. My Dramatic writing professor saying "America is about to elect a very stupid man" right before election day. That man being Bush II. He then told us about how is Father danced on the dining room table when the radio announced that FDR died and how he grew up in a Kansas Republican family but regretted pulling the leaver for Nixon in 1960 immediately. He went Democratic in 1964 and never turned back.

You can probably tell a lot about my background from these stories. Or at least the kind of undergrad school I went to. One where the lonely freshman who tried to form College Republicans was damned to failure every year.

Agreed.

This is why I have such a hard time understanding conservatives. They seem to sincerely believe that we are secretly creeping towards gray Soviet socialism. This makes me think of two things:

1. Do they know anything about socialism?

2. What do conservatives mean by freedom and liberty? Why is it always connected to big business and never social and civil liberties?

I think that there are still a lot of Democratic supporters and liberal/progressives who are firm supporters of the President. The whole "liberals are disappointed in Obama" meme seems to be a projection from the media in my eye. My hard-left friends might be disappointed but they probably would prefer having a viable Green party in any election. We do dislike and distrust Romney but that does not mean we are voting Democratic because it is the lesser of two evils.

I also think that we are seeing real ideological differences between the Democratic and Republican Parties. The Democratic Party is finally winning their foothold in the culture wars and not hiding from things like contraceptives and that there is nothing wrong with pre-marital sex. Hence inviting Sandra Fluke to speak at the DNC. I thought she was great. Also Obamacare and fighting against voter suppression.

I never saw President Obama as the second coming of Roosevelt or Tip O'Neil. He is a center-left pragmatic politician.

I have mixed feelings about the paleo-Conservatives at TAC.

You are right that they are not interested in throwing read meat and inflaming as much. Each of their writers seems to have an interesting hersey or two but in the end.

Dreher is still a hardened culture warrior. I disagree with the ultra-isolationism which seems to have the same racist background as the America First movement from WWII. And I have no idea what to make of Millman.