Comment by paulgb
5 years ago
> If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board.
One way to look at this is that that's exactly what Twitter has started doing. The president violated the TOS, and got the treatment prescribed under the TOS. His EO yesterday essentially asked for everyone to be treated in accordance with the TOS, so he's (ironically) getting exactly what he asked for.
It remains to be seen whether, in compliance with the EO, they apply this to everyone in a transparent and uniform way from now on. I hope they do.
Wait, Trump, the guy who had a platform plank complaining about his predecessors' use of executive orders as "power grabs" [0], actually issued an executive order about Twitter's TOS?
0 - https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-10-19/trump-...
It's nothing new. Politics is a team based sport. My brother calls Obama "King Obama" but is still a huge fan of Trump. I've discussed some of this stuff with him: in his eyes, Obama did stuff he shouldn't have, so Trump can do stuff he shouldn't.
> Politics is a team based sport.
That's optional though. The modern media, in the interest of money, has done a good job of causing the population of the US to miscategorize themselves into D/R. If it instead focused on human welfare, then we wouldn't be in this mess.
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> Politics is a team based sport.
I wonder if there is a relationship between the level of competitiveness that a people have for sports with the level of competitiveness that they have in politics and other aspects said people’s lives.
Competitive behavior seems to desire to highlight differences amongst the in-group versus the outgroups. Competitive behavior also excels at drumming up visceral desire to act regardless of whether the desire is rational or whether the act truly and completely satisfies the desire.
Why is it difficult to immediately associate with the largest in-group i.e. all of humanity / all of life itself / the objective truth?
Why not fight a group that has no members i.e. poverty (that which makes and keeps people poor as opposed to the poor), hunger, homelessness, poor health and disease, intolerable / harmful discomfort (difficulty breathing, too much heat, too much cold, too dry, too wet, etc.), pollution, and death (untimely or all death period)?
> I've discussed some of this stuff with him: in his eyes, Obama did stuff he shouldn't have, so Trump can do stuff he shouldn't.
This is a terrible line of thinking. I'm no Trump fan, but there's a ton of things neither Trump nor Obama should have done as president, and excusing one with the actions of another doesn't make a bad act good.
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I can understand how people can rationalize some of his failures, but, the second time around, how can someone vote for a guy who has failed on delivering on a very simple and basic campaign promise, one that he can do that unilaterally?
“The country wasn’t based on executive orders,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign stop in February 2016. “Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.”
I know I'm probably pissing in the wind here, but I was looking forward to a president ceding some of his power back to congress, so this one really sticks in my craw. Oh well.
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I voted for both but for different reasons.
Don't worry... he also criticized Obama for golfing too much, and has gone golfing more frequently than Obama.
And Senate Republicans have openly asked judges to resign so they can be replaced by conservative judges, and their justification for why it's okay to do this so close to an election but it wasn't okay to confirm Garland so close to an election literally amounts to "Obama's a Democrat, Trump's a Republican."
> And Senate Republicans have openly asked judges to resign so they can be replaced by conservative judges, and their justification for why it's okay to do this so close to an election but it wasn't okay to confirm Garland so close to an election literally amounts to "Obama's a Democrat, Trump's a Republican."
It's worse than that. There were at least three high ranking Republican Senators who said that if Clinton won the election, they would go her entire 4 (or 8) years without confirming any Supreme Court nominees, keeping any vacant seats open until there was a Republican President again to fill them.
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To be fair, the judges asked to resign (really retire) are conservatives. It's the same reason Ginsburg hasn't retired despite her health issues -- everything to do with which party would be nominating her replacement.
The next time the Democrats control the Senate and the Republicans the whitehouse, I wouldn't expect them be interested in confirming any judges right before a Presidential election either.
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