TheProgressiveLiberal

My preferred strategy is of course to wall ourselves off from the part of the world terrorists are coming from until the attacks stop. That said, if we are actually going to be successful in containing radical Islam in Afghanistan, Pakistan is going to have to be on our side really trying. Seems to me they've been trying to play both sides. It's a bit of a disappointment, but its a few thousand extra advisors. Same situation as the bombing of Syria. Disappointing, but if this is the worst our foreign policy gets then we lucked out. Who knows which regimes Clinton would be trying to topple right now. Do you really believe this? Building schools is all that stands between Afghanistan as it is and turning it into merry ol England? He had a segment on his show tonight mocking all the media outlets that reported what he said as if it wasn't a joke. I honestly don't know how anybody could interpret it any other way, but as I've said, I think Trump has broken the minds of some Democrats. They are behaving very strangely.

Wouldn't any massive regulatory change effect a large enterprise more than a small enterprise in the same line of business? I'm talking a change on the level of ending slavery. Wouldn't the small enterprise have much more flexibility?

Best sports trash talk shirt I've seen was from the University of Kansas. Their main rival is the University of Missouri. It was Missouri slaveholders attempting to move into Kansas that created the Bleeding Kansas situation in the decade before the Civil War. KU is called the Jayhawks, after free soil militia during Bleeding Kansas. MU is called the Tigers after the name of their towns pro-Confederate militia.

Of course. But the vast majority of slaves were owned by a handful of people. Lots of small farmers had a slave or two. It was the structure of the economy, but ending slavery wouldn't have changed their life one bit. It would have been a massive change for the large plantation owners.

We got slaves because rich people wanted cheaper labor, and more importantly, labor that they can control more easily for more efficient work. It's the same thought process behind why our rich today are so fanatically pro-immigration. As for why they fought, the same reason people fight for their homeland all the time. The devil I know, buying into the local propaganda, once the war starts it's always better in the short term for your side to win, patriotism, conscription, etc. A slave economy benefits the super rich. Obviously the slaves are fucked, but so are the working and middle classes. Slavery didn't build this country. It made a few people obscenely rich while holding back a proper society based on broadly shared prosperity. New York would never have joined the Confederacy, but you are correct that large portions of the Irish working class in east coast cities were Copperhead Democrats who favored letting the South go.

This is correct. Now I guess I know how liberals feel when somebody disagrees with them. Anyways, I just needed a country song about Jesus and guns in my safe space to allow me to be able to deal with the world again.

It's very, very likely that not a single one of those soldiers owned a slave. They were captured by an invading army near their own home. Not quite so simple.

Look at the hatred of the white people and an obviously mentally ill black lady. Do we really want these people in charge of our society? This peaceful demonstrator who from this video looks like a nice young man has been kicked out of his conservative Christian university right before his senior year after this video went viral. http://www.pnj.com/story/news/2017/08/18/confederate-demonstrator-kicked-out-pensacola-christian-college/579978001/ Meanwhile, in Durham, NC a communist party member has been charged with felonies because she led a mob which illegally toppled a memorial to Confederate soldiers. Her university is planning on giving her a scholarship.

I rarely get mad about politics and always try to remember that the point is to convince other people to change their minds and not mistreat them. This is testing my limits. I think some Democrats might have literally gone mad. Trump must have broken their brains or something. http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/madison-mayor-paul-soglin-orders-removal-of-confederate-monuments-at/article_0cd509e6-3b6b-56ab-b05c-c693d84de05d.html Confederate POWs died of disease at a camp in Madison, Wisconsin. They were put in a mass grave. A marker was placed their to honor them. It's now been removed. http://www.wbur.org/artery/2017/08/16/boston-confederate-monument Same deal in Boston. They have a monument to 13 Confederate soldiers who died there as POWs. At least there's not dead bodies below this monument, I suppose.

This is certainly part of it. There are 300 million guns in this country. Basically no one thinks the government could get them all rounded up, and most people wouldn't want the government to do what would actually be required to round them up. We have entire major cities and entire regions of major cities where the crime rate is amongst the worst in the world for non-war zones. Far worse than South Africa, or Guatemala, or wherever else you think violence is rampant. It's currently more dangerous to be a young black male in Baltimore than it was to be a US soldier in Iraq at the height of the insurgency. I think it's somewhere around double South Africa's murder rate in that city. I'm personally a believer that the reason crime stays confined to these few locations is that there's so much gun ownership in the rest of the country. We would be easy pickings if none of us had guns. I could be wrong on that, but it is what I think. And as I stated before, I doubt the government would do what's necessary to actually get all the guns out of a place like Baltimore. Their city council was recently debating what sounded like a perfectly reasonable proposal. Mandatory one year jail sentences for people caught carrying an illegal weapon. I'd personally change it to just people who had previously been convicted of a gun crime and make the sentence longer, but I'm not necessarily against the law as proposed. The local community seem pretty outraged by the proposal from the news I saw. They said the law promoted racist mass incarceration.

Yes. I have a .357 revolver, a shotgun, and a small .38 revolver. I rarely shoot. Maybe once or twice a year. I liked shooting when I was younger, but I suppose it's normal for interests to narrow as you get older. Sometimes I hang out with old friends who I don't see as much anymore who like to shoot as one of their main interests. It's mostly an excuse to catch up. I'd be perfectly happy to never shoot more than once every few years. I rarely carry a gun in my car, mainly because I usually leave the state at least a couple times per month and don't want to forget to remove the gun from my car. I drive a taxi and deliver food to people as my jobs so it wouldn't hurt me to have a gun just in case, but random robberies are rare and random murders are basically non-existent around here. I did carry a gun with me when I was younger and worked delivering food into bad neighborhoods. I know I'd be fine carrying a gun without ending up making a mistake in a panicky situation because I was robbed at gunpoint and knifepoint while carrying. I didn't do something stupid like start a fight to the death over a bit of money or shoot kids in the back as they ran away. Although I will say that the guys with the gun got a jump on me. Maybe if I saw them before they pointed at me I'd have pulled and opened fire. Can't say for sure I suppose. Oh and I also have a small penis and like to look tough in pictures, so gun ownership is a must.

The Constitution says a President can be impeached and removed from office for Treason, Bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. The issue is that there's no enforcement mechanism to require that there actually be a crime if enough of Congress agrees they want the President gone. What's to stop them from just making something up, calling it a "high crime," and voting to remove? I wonder if the Supreme Court would want a say? We learned something similar earlier this year from Bernie Sanders. The Constitution says that there can't be any religious test for holding office in the United States. Sanders openly stated that he would not vote for an assistant budget officer because the nominee once said that he thinks only born again Christians go to heaven in the context of a debate regarding the firing of a professor from his Christian university alma mater for claiming that you can get to heaven through other religions. Now, that is pretty clearly a religious test, but there is no mechanism in the Constitution to force Senators to vote based on what it says. It kind of just trusts them to do what it says on stuff like that. There's no court review which can force a Senator to change his vote.

Quick question. British people who say they dislike Americans, is it all based on political/cultural bigotry and snobbery or are their other reasons given as well? I get that this is a self selecting sample of British people who come up to tell an American why America is so great, but I hear over and over again that Americans are nice and happy while British people are bitter and angry. Now, that isn't my experience with British people. They all seem nice enough and, while there does seem to be a tendency towards "woe is me" humor, I wouldn't use the word bitter. But then again I've only met a subset of British people.

For the people mocking my argument regarding guns and cars. UK auto fatality rate is 2.9/100,000. USA is 10.6/100,000. It's not so easy on guns, because I'm assuming any non-criminal British person with enough money for intercontinental travel isn't going to be very likely to be murdered in America. Probably not significantly higher than the likelihood of being murdered in the UK. But not British person ever says I couldn't ever live in the USA, I might die in a car crash. Please work harder on your reading comprehension. My quote was clearly in answer to talk about violence at Trump rallies. Now, for the guy at the Nazi rally I've already said that I'm fairly certain that guy would not have rammed his car into the crowd of people if the police and local government had done their job and stopped clashes from happening. I could be wrong and it may have been preplanned that he would have run over peaceful lefty protesters politely making their views known. I kind of doubt that though. Assuming the reality is as it looks and he purposely murdered someone, he gets number one blame. The Virginia governor and Charlottesville mayor are numbers two and three. Federal law enforcement should subpoena their communications to see if they conspired to circumvent the federal court order to police the protest and protect everyone involved. If they did they should be criminally charged.

Despite the whole national media being in favor of changing the name or at least agreeing it might be offensive: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/new-poll-finds-9-in-10-native-americans-arent-offended-by-redskins-name/2016/05/18/3ea11cfa-161a-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html?utm_term=.fee3f77d0aed New poll finds 9 in 10 Native Americans aren’t offended by Redskins name Perfect example of how a small group of activists yell long enough about something being racist (often because that's how they make money) and eventually a bunch of white liberals will agree to signal their anti-racist virtue, whether what the activists were actually complaining about is actually racist.

Not quite. They climbed over the fence to the back yard in the middle of the night. Still, obviously something that wouldn't have happened in Scotland. For those who mentioned stand your ground, that has nothing to do with this case. This is castle doctrine. What stand your ground does in areas where it's passed is extend the concept of the castle doctrine to public areas.

Thanks. I now know not to use that example. Too bad, I thought it was a good point. You didn't have to know about WWII or the holocaust to know the Nazis were bad. Fascists had recently taken over several European countries, and like you say lots of the respectable set thought they were the future. There's an argument to be made that violent resistance is in order under those conditions. There are no fascist governments in the Western world, the entire elite is united against fascism, and fascist parties get paltry vote totals in both the US and UK. I guess they do a bit better in some European countries, but call me when they get anywhere beyond protest votes. 100% of organized political violence was by the left. Have you seen the videos? The handful of incidents by Trump supporters involved people making fools of themselves and acting purposely provocatively at a private event. If I went to a Hibs v Hearts game in a Rangers jersey, sat in the supporters section, and started waving a British flag and singing God Save the Queen, I might get punched. That's vastly different than a rival hooligan firm showing up outside a Rangers bar and attacking me as I walk out.

I get that your fear of guns is emotional not rational, but I'd wager British people are just as safe from murder in the US as they are in Britain, assuming you're not a criminal and your missus doesn't want you gone. What would probably get you is a car crash. We have to drive a bunch more here. That would be the bigger leap in danger from moving from the UK to the US.

Yes, a Nazi rally in the 1930s has the same significance as a Nazi rally in 2017. Jesus! Context matters. A bunch of weirdos from around the country stepping off the internet for one day is not the end of democracy. Democrats condoning street violence from the same far left organizations which also attack mainstream Republicans might actually have serious consequences for democracy, though.

Where are we getting the idea that Trump didn't condemn the Nazi rally that day? I saw several tweets. Also, Ann Coulter on the situation: But so far, all we know is that Fields said he was "upset about black people" and wanted to kill as many as possible. On his Facebook page, he displayed a "White Power" poster and "liked" three organizations deemed "white separatist hate groups" by the Southern Poverty Law Center. A subsequent search of his home turned up bomb-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition and a personal journal of combat tactics. Actually, none of that is true. The paragraph above describes, down to the letter, what was known about Micah Xavier Johnson, the black man who murdered five Dallas cops a year ago during a Black Lives Matter demonstration. My sole alteration to the facts is reversing the words "black" and "white." President Obama held a news conference the next day to say it's "very hard to untangle the motives." The New York Times editorialized agnostically that many "possible motives will be ticked off for the killer." (One motive kind of sticks out like a sore thumb to me.)

Heard somebody make the point that it was good the Christians didn't start destroying statues when they got power in Rome. Of course the difference was that those emperors who had persecuted Christians were still of their Roman culture for the early Christians. Black radicals in America view American historical figures as an alien people to be destroyed as an exercise of power in the present day, more like how radical Muslims view old Buddhas. It's already started. Prominent black leaders are already calling for the removal of various monuments to slave owning Presidents in black areas of the country. It's not going to stop. And eventually the white left will get around to siding with the black radicals, because they for some reason let radicals define what constitutes racism. Once enough radicals start saying something is racist you can be sure a bunch of weak moderate Democrats will fall in line. The Indians generally favored the Confederacy. In the South and in the Indian Territory which became Oklahoma they were slave owners. The last Confederate General to surrender his army was a Cherokee Chief.

Weird how shocked you are by that Vice video. What did you think Nazis are like? Have you never heard what they have to say? Vice did an episode on the 3%ers if your curious to see how they differ from the Nazis in the video posted above. Unfortunately they interview the $LPC to get the counter and they talked about right wing violence which had nothing to do with the 3%ers without making the lack of official connection clear. Of course there are crazy people that try to latch onto any fringe ideology. I'm a Nativist, but not a White Nationalist. Again, those people at Charlottesville are few and far between on the ground. I've literally only met one anti-sematic person in my life, and he was German. You guys were second on his shit list by the way. I think his exact quote was something like, "I don't like the Poles and I don't like the French, but I really fuckin hate the British." Although I'm not sure if continental Europeans lump you guys in with the English as one group like we do here in the US. I went to London with him and he couldn't stop making comments about how much he hated everyone and everything we encountered. I asked him why he was anti-sematic, but he didn't give a real reason.

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/770000-tubes-spit-help-map-americas-great-migrations/ From that hairball her team pulled out more than 60 unique genetic communities—Germans in Iowa and Mennonites in Kansas and Irish Catholics on the Eastern seaboard. Then they mined their way through generations of family trees (also provided by their customers) to build a migratory map. Finally, they paired up with a Harvard historian to understand why communities moved and dispersed the ways they did. Religion and race were powerful deterrents to gene flow. But nothing, it turned out, was stronger than the Mason Dixon line. “I have to admit I was surprised by that,” says Ball. “This political boundary had the same effect as what you’d expect from a huge desert or mountain range.” % foreign born 1860 (Civil War), 1920 (100 yrs ago as you say) United States - 13.2%, 13.6% Alabama - 1.3%, 0.8% Arkansas - 0.8%, 0.8% Georgia - 1.1%, 0.6% Louisiana - 11.4%, 2.6% Mississippi - 1.1%, 0.5% North Carolina - 0.3%, 0.3% South Carolina - 1.4%, 0.4% Tennessee - 1.9%, 0.7% Virginia - 2.2%, 1.4% Only in the last 20 years have these states started to be over 2% foreign born, and it's jumped up fast. Before that they almost all descended mostly from the original colonists, and those original white colonists were almost exclusively British outside of a few areas.

There were Jews who were very high in the Confederate government, including the Cabinet if you didn't know. I don't think anti-Semitism is included in the various racisms of the Confederacy. Can't say I have many thoughts on Jews. Don't think I've met more than a couple. They were nice. I did read a funny article comparing prominent Jewish conservatives freaking out about Trump's proposed wall and immigration policy compared with their previous statements about Israel's border wall and even some arguing for removing Muslims from Israel proper as part of a peace settlement. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews have different voting habits on average. Probably partially due to ethnic history, partially due to class history, and partially due to geography.

I was an adult before I realized that the Confederate flag was considered racist by some people. In West Virginia when I was growing up Civil War reenactments were popular, since the locals had ancestors that fought on different sides. My dad's best friend was huge into it so I went to a couple as a kid. People would line up on whichever side their family had fought, or whichever side they liked best. At the high school I went to in Indiana the students used to have Rebel Flag Fridays and the whole student body would show up to school wearing Confederate flag gear. It was meant as a symbol of youth rebellion. Our official student designed senior shirt which I still have has a Confederate flag right on the back of it. I never heard anybody mention race in either place, but I will admit it might be different in places where there were black people. I'm not 100% sure. When I lived in Georgia as an adult it was after they had changed the official state flag from to The funny thing is that the new flag was based on the flag of the Confederate state, rather than the General Lee's battle flag. Here's the actual Confederate States flag. I will say that I never saw a single person flying the new flag, but the old flag was everywhere tacked up in people's houses.