I’m reading the news about Hillary Clinton’s pick for a VP.
Hillary Clinton has chosen Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine to be her running mate, turning to a steady and seasoned hand in government to fill out the Democratic ticket, she announced Friday.
I thought that was Clinton’s reputation: steady and seasoned.
It may be an anti-establishment year, but Clinton’s running mate is an insider: A senator and former governor from the critical battleground of Virginia and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
After a campaign in which Bernie Sanders gave her a strong run for the nomination, she picks the establishment guy. OK.
Kaine, 58, has long been seen as a seasoned and safe choice for Clinton, who could help shore up support among white working-class voters.
Bored now.
He went to Harvard law school, but before graduating served a year as a missionary in Honduras.
It was an experience that cemented his Catholic faith and strengthened his fluency in Spanish.
There’s nothing there to get me enthused, that’s for sure.
Advisers to Clinton see Kaine as a stable force on the bottom of the ticket, foregoing the allure of a pick that could provide more star power in favor of one they are hoping will be void of drama
Oh, jebus. So bored! Even the news stories are emphasizing his lack of pizazz.
Safe safe safe safe safe safe safe safe. I guess it’s one way to run the campaign, and it might very well work…but it’s really going against the grain of the political impetus this year.
I guess she figures all the reasonable people are already planning to vote for her, having no choice in the matter, so she is going to avoid taking any risks at all.
Clinton’s running mate is a catholic “personally against abortion, but…” writes informed consent and parental consent restrictions against the practice. He favors deregulating banks and businesses.
Shit.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a former Goldwater girl who was married to a moderate neocon president picks a neocon president. Still, wtf. (This not to mention his opinion on abortion.) Still wins out over a neofascist with close ties to Putin… but to be fair almost everyone else does.
*neocon VICE president. I really need to edit my post before hitting send.
I don’t see why you highlighted his Catholic faith. Are you suggesting we should subject candidates to a religious test?
RE: Kaine is wrong but that the same line Biden takes.
Mike Smith @ 3
Mike, don’t look now, but I think there are atheists hanging around this atheist blog.
Heaven forfend! I mean why should anyone who has left-wing poltical goals be concerned that a member of a religion made up of Medieval, child-raping, anti-gay, misogynists is a heartbeat away from the Oval Office?
I’m kind of done being reasonable. Not that I’ve… ever… actually been reasonable before. If you need me, I’ll be busy preparing for next year by looking for shiny new ways to misappropriate funds.
Hey. This is what you signed on for, so there’s no point in regretting it now. After all, you’re going to vote for her no matter what she does right?
Yeah, that TPP support just gave trump major march, no matter how minor it was.
I’m from VA and despite the Catholic stuff and the fact he’s a politician, Tim Kaine was a damn good governor and an excellent mayor of Richmond. IMO, he is not your typical, slimy,mealy mouthed politician. I have to say he was a breath of fresh air, did some good stuff and I have a lot of respect for him. Pretty much everyone, even the republicans in the legislature, had a hard time saying anything bad about him. Even though he seems boring on the surface, he is a genuinely kind, decent person with a lot of smarts and common sense–his religion was never an issue when he was governor. Not sure why it’s being brought up now, except it seems expected these days of candidates.
It’s worse than that. She already had the comfortable, middle-of-the-road vote. What she needed in order to prevent the Trumpocalypse was to go after the youth and anti-establishment vote, but in choosing the DNC insider, she pretty much just told them to fuck off.
Predictable.
Damned smug fool might have screwed us all.
@Akira
I’m an atheist as well. A queer atheist. I still don’t think a candidate’s religious views are relevant.
You do know that religious tests are expressly forbidden by the consitution right? Do I need to explain the long history of anti-Catholic sentiment in this country?
Look if Kaine’s Catholicism motivates his political beliefs and/or actions then all you need to do is attack his political beliefs and/or actions. If his Catholicism doesn’t motivates his political belief/ actions then it is irrelevant.
By all means attack him for being antiabortion and passing anti-choice laws. But even if he did those actions because Catholic there is still no reason to talk about uus religion.
Should j take Nixon to task for being a (bad) Quaker?
so what if his background is Catholic, as long as he keeps it personal and avoids the Pence approach to force it on everybody else?!?!? [that punctuated reaction was specifically due to the mention of Pence policy]
seriously. I can’t stop being reminded of a similar issue about JFK being Catholic.
—
all of the above made it seem like a part of the reason Hillary chose Kaine, as contrast to Drumph’s choice (who shall no longer be referred to by name), or so I’d like to think.
Kaine is pro-big-banks (just this Monday he wrote to federal regulators to ask them not to punish big banks which had broken the law), pro-TPP, and pro-war, so he’s a middle finger to the left from Hillary Clinton. What a surprise. Go on, Clinton supporters, tell me how she’s so liberal again.
So, do I get to say “I told you so” yet? Or should I wait a while longer for Clinton to make it even more blatant that she’s basically in the pockets of Wall Street? Paging Nerd of Redhead, paging Nerd of Redhead, I can’t tell what to do unless you’re here to tell me what I shouldn’t be able to say…
Great. It’s 2000 all over again— batshit crazy Republican runs against squishy neocon Democrat with even-more-conservative running mate who flips off the left on the assumption they’ll vote for her no matter what as long as she’s the “lesser evil.” Some do, but some vote Green on the grounds that they’re the only viable option. Others vote for Trump on the idea that if we’re going to end up with a neocon anyway, it’s better to have the one whose actions will reflect badly on the Republicans rather than the Democrats. Many more don’t bother to vote at all. The “undecided” low information voters largely pick the charismatic candidate making empty promises rather than the stodgy candidate who denies their suffering. Batshit Republican takes office; we endure 4-8 years of batshit while Democrats blame the left for failing to vote against their own self-interest and the Greens for existing but not the Democrats for failing to run a viable candidate.
Naming Sanders as VP would have been a costly signal that might have convinced me Clinton’s “I’m totally a progressive this time” schtick wasn’t a total lie. Naming an anti-choice DINO from Virginia? Yeah, no. I’m voting for Stein and anyone who complains about that can fuck right off.
so what if his background is Catholic, as long as he keeps it personal and avoids the Pence approach to force it on everybody else?!?!?
I’m sorry I mentioned the “catholic” bit. Let me break it down differently for you:
From Politico via Slate:
Who’s complaining if you shut the fuck up about choice after this post?
From someone living in Virginia I can tell you Virginians love this guy. He pretty much will take VA out of the “toss up” category.
Kaine’s got a 100% approval rating from NARAL and Planned Parenthood. That’s why religious tests are not appropriate: He votes the right way so who cares what he believes on Sunday mornings.
@ 15 Jake
So you’d vote for an anti-vaxxer whack job instead of work to keep Trump out of the White House?
My comment on his Catholicism was
Am I supposed to be excited about it?
Is anyone really using “Liberal” has her primary characteristic. Maybe I’m unaware, but I’d rather consider her capable of getting things done in the direction of liberal values and progressive. I see her as liberal but flexible in ways to quell opposition, to get things accomplished. Drumph and his sycophants think he can accomplish stuff single handed like a dictator. Hill recognizes ‘it takes a village’, that a village is not an echo-chamber, that it takes the cooperation of a wide range of personalities to accomplish actual beneficial programs. Which is why she picked Kaine who is not the ideal Liberal icon some would have expected her to champion, but a more practical choice.
sheese, I hope I conveyed the meaning I was trying to get across. I am a pretty lousy writer.
IOW, Kaine is tolerable not ideal. good enough.
Let’s all just agree that we all have our own opinions on certain politicians, all those opinions are wrong, we will never listen to anyone with a different opinion, and [insert thing that you agree with here].
@Professor Myers
No I don’t expect you to be happy about it. It doesn’t warrant commentary at all. There are a ton of liberal and progressive Catholics.
Religion is a lazy and misleading heuristic for politcal beliefs/actions which is why I ignore it.
There are a ton of alt right pro Trump atheists.
The religious label doesn’t even really track with political beliefs/actions.
Should I dislike Nixon more for also being a (bad) Quaker?
Mike Smith @12
You’re a queer atheist? You could of fooled me, Mikey. Regardless of what genitals you prefer to fuck, from your posts on other threads you seem like just another pile of right-wing shit to me.
Yes. Do you know there is a vast difference between official government tests barring candidates from public office and the individual choices or voters?
Speaking as a Recovering Cat-lick, I am well aware of American anti-Catholicism. However, just because a bunch of 18th-19th century WASP assholes were mean to Irish and Italian immigrants doesn’t invalidate the arguments against Catholicism. It’s like accusing critics of Israeli policy toward Palestine of anti-semitism by using the Holocaust as a guilt-trip.
Yes, ignore the actual source of those beliefs. They can’t possibly have ANY influence over a person’s politics. Beliefs exist in a vacuum.
As for Nixon, Yes. We should also hold Hillary to the coals for her Methodism. Just because you’re a seemingly “nicer” flavor of wrong doen’t make you any less wrong.
For a “queer” atheist, you seem awfully willing to make excuses for the scum who are making life harder for non-believers and LGBTQs. In which case, findly go fuck yourself in whatever method is the most painful and socially humiliating.
nutella @ 19
They evidently haven’t been paying attention, or have these defenders of a woman’s bodily autonomy become as “pragmatic” and “realistic” as HRC and the Democrats? It’s only misogyny when it’s a Republican passing forced ultrasound and parental consent bills?
slithey trove @ 23
Right, because after decades of running our civilization into the group with their demonstrably WRONG economic policies and ideological/religious beliefs, we really should listen to their input.
Akira MacKenzie@#26:
have these defenders of a woman’s bodily autonomy become as “pragmatic” and “realistic” as HRC and the Democrats? It’s only misogyny when it’s a Republican passing forced ultrasound and parental consent bills?
It sounds that way. From the Politico story “Tim Kaine’s abortion predicament”:
(www.politico.com/story/2016/07/tim-kaine-abortion-predicament-225053)
Cynicism and expediency. If Clinton wins, that’s what we’re in for a lot of.
found a tweet:
I too oppose [to say the least] the NRA and appreciate those who are not intimidated by them. So a positive in Kaine’s favor.
Marcus Ranum @ 28
Earlier this spring, Clinton went on record saying that it’s possible to be anti-choice and be a feminist. No noticable outrage here or anywhere else. If that statement came out of the mouth out of anyone from outside the Democratic Party, NARAL and Planned Parenthood would have rightfully crucified them. I seriously doubt anyone of the Pharyngula regulars would have tolerated it if it came from the lips of Cruz or Rubio or Drumpf.
And yet…
The demand for ideological purity is what has been killing the Republican party over the last decade. Lambasting Kaine because he isn’t properly pure on a handful of issues when, realistically, he agrees with Warren and Sanders on more than 95% of the issues is going down the same path on the Democratic side.
In addition to his 100% rating from Planned Parenthood, Kaine also has a 100% rating from the Brady Campaign and the Human Rights Campaign, and a 96% rating from the AFL CIO and the NAACP. He has an F rating from the NRA. He is a Governor and Senator from Virginia who has taken on both the NRA and the tobacco lobby.
Warren wasn’t a plausible choice, as she would have been replaced in the Senate by a Republican governor. In any event, would you rather have her doing essentially nothing as VP, or chairing something like the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee in the Senate? Kaine will be replaced in the Senate by a Democratic governor, and the seat will stay in Democratic hands, making a majority there that much more likely.
If you want a progressive Clinton administration, vote in a progressive Congress and you’ll get one.
So because PZM doesn’t comment on every single statement coming from HRC, that means …what exactly? Perhaps it simply wasn’t spotted. But do carry on with your speculations as to his motives, that’s real productive.
Does anybody really think a Vice President has any serious input into presidential decisions? You think Pence will influence Trump? Or Kaine will influence Clinton? The only time he’ll come into play is if Clinton dies in office. Which could always happen, of course, but Kaine doesn’t seem like much risk in that case.
Akira McKenzie@#30:
I seriously doubt anyone of the Pharyngula regulars would have tolerated it if it came from the lips of Cruz or Rubio or Drumpf
Or Richard Dawkins…
@17 Troll: Fuck right off.
@20 Grumpy Santa:
That’s… not even wrong.
@22 slithey tove:
Nerd of Redhead, for starters. And that’s just people who’ve posted in this thread— practically anyone who whines that I’m voting for a liberal candidate also insists that Clinton isn’t anything but.
Willing to settle for a public option instead of single payer is “liberal but flexible.” Happily supporting the mass slaughter of Syrian civilians for its own sake is pretty much the direct opposite of “liberal.”
@25 Akira MacKenzie:
Oh I’ve seen that accusation more times than I can count.
Of course. IOKIYAD— cutting welfare was offensive when Reagan did it but “realistic” when (Bill) Clinton did it. Reagan’s support for the War On Drugs was a barely-disguised War On Black People but (Bill) Clinton’s support for it was “pragmatic.” Fighting an imperialist war of aggression was a moral outrage when Bush did it, but “realistic” when Obama did it. Coddling big bankers who commit crimes while persecuting whistleblowers who report on crimes was proof of Bush’s corruption and proof of Obama’s “pragmatism.”
Every now and then, I’ve asked— is there any policy or action so odious that you would never support it even if it were done by Democrat running against a technically-worse Republican? I’ve never gotten an answer from any of the “Clinton or bust” nutjobs in the comment threads, though PZ himself said that being anti-choice was his dealbreaker.
@31 aaronpound:
He’s anti-choice. He believes big banks are above the law. He supports deregulation in 2016. He supports the TPP. “Agrees with Sanders and Warren 95%” my ass.
It seems increasingly clear that whining about “ideological purity” is a shibboleth of the “Democratic brand loyalist” strand of DINO, so I doubt you’re amenable to reason.
@33 tomh:
Or Cheney will influence Bush?
Exactly.
If you want a progressive Clinton administration
That’s like saying “If you want a rational Trump administration…” Or “if you want an administration that’s not beholden to banks, then …”
Clinton’s not a progressive. We know. We got that. If we wanted a progressive, Clinton’s not it. Gosh, you are perceptive.
@Akira
1) as I have repeatedly stated I am a classical liberal who is extremely sympathetic to Rawls and 2) believes a robust social safety net is extremely prudent. It’s just I worry about securing negative liberty more than average poster here. Shorter: I’m far to left if Clinton and a smidging to the right of Democratic Socialism.
2) re: religious text. While the constitutional clause can not be enforced against individual voters it is conceptually binding on them. The reason being naturally that voting is an official power of the state. In short voters qua citizens are agents of the state and ought to abide the religious neutrality embedded in the no religious test clause and 1st amendment. The no religious needs to be both de jure and de facto, which is why I usually speak when anyone starts imposing one.
If it is wrong for republicans to reject candidates like Keith Ellison for being Muselim, it’s also wrong for liberals to get queasy over a person being Catholic.
3) RE: anti-catholicism then you must be aware that one if the major hangups was people feared Catholics would only follow the Pope. And yet here you are suggesting Kaine us problematic for being a Catholic.
Whether Catholicism is wrong, generally, is 1) unprovable and 2) beside the point. The question is not should one be a catholic? The question is should I vote for Kaine?
When we are discussing the first feel free to attacks Catholicism qua Catholicism.
4) I never said political beliefs happen is isolation. I said their origin doesn’t matter. It makes no difference if Kaine is antiabortion because he is catholic, or Muslim or a raging sexist, or a Kantian, or a Hobbesian, or a lockean, or no of those things. What matters is what he says he is going to do as an agent of the state and what he dies do with that power. If your problem is with Kaine being anti choice then don’t distract from the issue at hand by attacking him for being a Catholic. Call him out for being anti choice.
Catholicism is neither necessary or sufficient for being anti choice.
5) should I take Martin Luther King Jr to task for arguing for civil rights in explicitly religious terms?
My point about Nixon was his Quakerism didn’t prevent from being a war monger and war criminal and as such it is completely irrelevant to Hus actions. It makes little sense to bother condemning Nixon for being a Quaker in light if any other grounds to have a problem with him on.
It’s not about being nicer, it’s about focusing on the actions of the person.
6) fuck you for invalidating my queer identity for not falling inline on certain issues. Nothing pisses me off more than being reduced to who I have sex with. As if because I’m queer I must be believe XYZ.
Second, religious based homphobia is not the only source of homophobia. I’m not even sure if it us the primary source of it. Third much of the problems that religious homophobia cause can not be alleviated political. People are and ought to remain free to express moral disapproval of homosexuality. People are and ought to remain free to picket pride celebrations.
I very much would prefer to live in a world where the Catholic Church didn’t routinely condemn me to hell-it’s stressful-but the only way to live in that world us by cracking down on belief with state force, which is grossly wrong or convince that Church it is wrong which isn’t going to happen as many of the issues are philosophically intractable.
Now excuse me if deal with mg oppression by being extra diligent to ensure I don’t end up oppressing others
Holms wrote:
I had been hoping that she’d pick someone energetic and obviously passionate to counter out her rather stoic public persona and counterbalance her campaign against the Trump cult of personality. I worry that her “boring” VP pick might result in low turnout which will greatly benefit the Republicans and Trump.
Clinton had a choice. She could choose Warren and appeal to the left base. Or she could choose Kaine and appeal to moderates and Rockefeller Republicans who don’t like Trump. I suppose she’s planning that after Sanders (hopefully) gives a big speech next week exhorting his supporters to support Clinton 100% in the election, she won’t need to worry about her base. But she does need to worry about moderates going to Trump.
Look at McCain. He made a risky choice with Palin and that backfired. I’m hoping that Trump choosing someone as conservative as Pence will also backfire. This was the safe choice. Low risk, low reward. I would have greatly preferred Warren, but I don’t object to Kaine, and still plan to vote Clinton over Trump. And I still believe that someone who would vote a 3rd party over Clinton (at least in a swing state) because she isn’t far enough left is cutting off their nose to spite their face.
As for Kaine himself, I don’t know much about him. But based on his ratings from various groups, I’m fairly satisfied.
It sounds like Clinton is playing to avoid losing rather than winning. Which is a fair strategy – she just needs to win the always-blue states and 1-2 swing states in November, and she has the Presidency. Especially since VPs usually don’t bring anything to the campaigns like they used, but can become a liability (see Sarah Palin).
It is a bummer, though. She shouldn’t be trying to just win the Presidency – she should be trying to get the Senate in 2016 as well, so she can actually do stuff on the Supreme Court and appoint officials before the electoral math swings favorable to Republicans in 2018 and they essentially stop everything but the basic functions of government.
The Democratic party is really enjoying being the lesser of two evils way too much. It’s not only angering to its more progressive base, it’s also dangerous. This VP pick will do nothing to convince disgruntled Sanders supporters to go out to vote for Clinton in November. Maybe Trump is awful enough to motivate sufficient anti-Trump voters to get Clinton elected, anyway, but it’s a damn risky gamble and if you gamble too long and too high, eventually you’ll lose. And then Trump or – next time around – somebody very much like Trump will be the next president.
@futurechemist
Warren would have been a bad choice. Not only would they be taking a powerful progressive Senator out of the Senate and putting them as a mostly redundant back-up in the White House, they’d be giving Republicans the chance to replace her with a Republican Senator.
A better progressive choice would have been Tom Perez, Obama’s labor secretary. Latino, staunchly progressive and pro-labor, good speaker, and good organizational manager. It would have been an absolute pleasure to hear him speak on the campaign trail and eviscerate Mike Pence in the VP debate.
Yet you supported Saint Bernard ‘The Walking Turd’ Slanders who called Planned Parenthood ‘The Establishment’ and schmoozed up to the child-molesting, anti-choice, pro-HIV, anti-LGBT and very very catholic Pope.
Methinks your white male privilege is showing.
I am wildly unenthused about this choice. It does support Jake and the Vicar’s arguments about Clinton being ready to pander to the right. But she’s still better than Trumppence and, frankly, still better than Stein or whats-his-name, the Libertarian candidate. Just as “WTF, Biden?” didn’t make me not vote Obama, this won’t make me not vote Clinton. But it does make me feel better about my original choice in the primary (Bernie), despite the Bernie boys and their nonsense.
Virginia’s a swing state. If Kaine delivers it, that’s to the good. Or maybe she picked him as life insurance, kind of like Bush”s Quayle pick.
Exactly how significant is the Vice President in the constellation of US executive power anyway?
A number of people here seem to be intimating that he or she is not very important. Which would chime with what I am familiar with in English politics. Here the Deputy Prime Minister is basically the guy who makes sure nothing important catches fire while the actual Prime Minister is away sunning himself in Tuscany over the summer. It is not a position sought by or given to ambitious and powerful people. Mind you, our deputy PM does not automatically become PM if the actual incumbent dies from Chianti poisoning or resigns or melts or explodes, so there’s probably quite a difference.
From what I’ve seen of US vice presidents, I can’t say I get the impression that they’re powerful people. Al Gore became far more prominent on the world stage when he switched to environmental campaigning, Dick Cheney’s brand of evil didn’t seem to rely on the office he held to work its maleficence, but rather his web of cronies in big business, and Joe Biden… well, if someone told me he was actually a stuffed doll I wouldn’t be tremendously surprised. But perhaps that is just the media picture I have received.
I am keenly aware that the whole culture of US electioneering is fantastically overblown and laboured, particularly at this point in the interminably long electon process. Stepping back from the hype and spin, I would simply ask – how much does this choice actually matter?
Cartomancer @47: The VP has little to no actual power in the US government. He or she is there as backup in case the president dies and for ceremonial functions and symbolism. I think there are one or two actual functions that become important very occasionally, but it’s really not much.
Originally, the VP was supposed to be the second top vote getter in the election, so that if the president died or became incapacitated, the will of the people* would still be carried out, as far as possible. The rapid development of the two party system made this concept obsolete at best and the VP position was changed to being the president’s choice. I have no idea how a single early president remained unassassinated, given the old system.
*Well, the will of the white male landowners. The US was an oligarchy until the 1920s, at the earliest.
Cartomancer, there is another reason I believe it does not matter very much. It gives me no pleasure to say it but I think Trump will become the next US president. Because, unfortunately, his brand of fascism is irresistable to lots of voters .
I favour deregulating railways. Imagine all the places they could go, all the good they could do if they were no longer hamstrung by railway tracks telling them what they could and couldn’t do. There might be the occasional crash ruining hundreds or thousands of lives, but when that happens we’ll just give the railway companies more money until it all blows over.
#48. dianne: the Veep also breaks ties in the Senate, which has happened. Okay, not often, but still. I just checked – it’s happened 244 times, more than we’ve had assassinations. So there’s that.
#44. brett: I’d thought Julian Castro had a chance two months ago, but he’s gone and fucked up his career lately. Tom Perez: I agree wholeheartedly he’d have been an ideal choice. He’s not holding on to a seat that could be flipped to the Republicans, and he’s a true Progressive/liberal.
#31. aaronpound: This clause would have blown the top of my head off when I was younger; however, age and regular disappointment just make me sigh nowadays: “[l]ambasting Kaine because he isn’t properly pure on a handful of issues . . . “. That handful of issues you so casually dismiss is life or death to straight women – not just women who are currently fertile and fucking, but the girls who soon will be, as well as the women who once suffered through illegal abortions or forced breeding. Nothing keeps women down more than forced breeding. It’s amazing that we still have to echo in 2016 what Abigail Adams said to her husband, “Remember the women, John.” Fuck.
#39. Mike Smith, let me clarify what I think of your normative reponse to Akira regarding your inaccurate use of the phrase “religious test.” This is what you wrote:
“While the constitutional clause can not be enforced against individual voters it is conceptually binding on them. The reason being naturally that voting is an official power of the state. In short voters qua citizens are agents of the state and ought to abide the religious neutrality embedded in the no religious test clause and 1st amendment. The no religious needs to be both de jure and de facto, which is why I usually speak when anyone starts imposing one.
I really don’t know where to begin. “Conceptually binding” on Americans? Are you high? We’re not “agents of the state,” whatever on earth you might mean by that. Of course I’ll take his Catholicism into account. Kaine will be the president if Clinton is assassinated or croaks. Perhaps in 1960 some idiots questioned if JFK would take his marching orders from the Pope, and perhaps you even know such idiots today. But I sure don’t, and pretending that people think the same way now that they did 56 years ago is disingenuous.
But your facade of reason slips when you write that we “ought to abide the religious neutrality,” etc. “Ought?” As I wrote above: normative. The word “ought,” like “should,” generally implies some sort of test in and of itself; when it doesn’t, it implies an authority one has over another. What I ought to do is what I’m free to do, and you ought to keep your quasi-legal morals between you and your priest.
Mike Smith
No it isn’t. It really, really isn’t. Nowhere in the constitution is there anything that “binds” individuals.
No it isn’t, in a democracy.
Please find me ONE constitutional scholar who agrees with your idiotic interpretation of the constitution.
Why does it NEED to be “de facto”? And “I wish it were so” is not a valid answer.
Who is talking about imposing one?
Why?
I like how you dishonestly try to link the original long-abandoned reason for not voting catholic with not voting for one now. Maybe there are other reason not to do so?
Yawn, no. It is wrong, and up to them to prove it is correct. After two millenia without even an inkling of a start of any proof we can safely assume they’ve got nothing.
So why bring it up?
You do realize that first sentence can be one of the things taken into consideration in your second one, right?
mysteriousqfever@52: Thanks! I knew I was forgetting some rare but potentially occasionally critical function of the VP and that was it. I should have googled it. I blame executive function failure.
I’m about to type seven words I promise you no one has ever put together into a single sentence. Ever.
Damn; I was rooting for Tom Vilsack.
Another Virginian here. Tim Kaine’s one of the good guys. He dragged a state that’s half-full of wingnuts in a progressive direction. That’s pretty much the job of the next Democratic administration, so I support this choice.
Wikileaks has published the first tranche of DNC emails. Reports are they also contain Social Security and credit card numbers.
no, because voting for a 3rd party candidate… when at BEST 3rd party candidates have a tiny penetration in a handful of states at this point in the US… is literally wasting your vote.
that’s just plain facts.
you want change? fucking run for office yourself locally, or encourage people you would think would do the job right to run locally and support them as independent candidates.
in another generation, with a lot of hard work, you might actually make a 3rd party candidate for POTUS a viable thing. Hell, it was Bernie Sanders dream once upon a time; it’s why he went into public office, where most of the revolution of the 60s burned out instead.
but that is the NOT the US you live in. if you WANT that… you have to do a LOT more to establish a party platform that toss your vote to a 3rd party for POTUS and pretend that has any value.
like we keep telling you…
My main concern, is who gets to pick a Supreme Court justice.
Clinton or Trump?
I don’t like everything about Clinton, but I don’t like anything about Trump.
Who would Trump pick as a nominee for the Supreme Court?
Think about that. This is for all the marbles folks.
Supreme Court justices are around for decades.
I’m not excited about Kaine. Kinda boring choice.
Safe, but boring. He speaks fluent Spanish.
Imagine a political ad in where the candidate speaks fluent Spanish to a Latino audience.
If I were Latino that would influence my vote.
That and he doesn’t think Mexicans are all rapists.
If Hillary had made a non-boring, non-safe choice, then lost the election, I can guarantee you that there would be a huge amount of blame placed on her for making a risky choice that cost us everything. This election is fucking close. We’d like to think it isn’t, but it is. Trump has an honestly real chance of winning here. And Hillary is nothing but strategic – I’m sure the DNC ran stats every which way from Sunday and decided Kaine has the potential to get the most votes. Which isn’t callous or cynical – the most votes means the most people agreeing with you. That means doing what the most people want, which is democracy. That means a good setup to be able to have the VP persuade all of the currently in place non-Hillary supporter senators to support their initiatives.
Yeah, I’m not thrilled that it’s a progressive banner. But it’s a slate that has a good chance of getting shit done. I fear that we’re forgetting how bipartisanship actually works, because we haven’t seen it in so long – it doesn’t mean lurching back and forth between extremisms.
Just another indication that GW Bush’s fifth term will be a smooth continuation of his previous four. That’s reassuring in a way, I suppose, maybe?
On the other hand I’m no political consultant, but it seems to me an unenthusiastic electorate could be bad for GW Hillary. This election could hinge on turnout.
That handful of issues you so casually dismiss is life or death to straight women
Planned Parenthood gives him a 100% rating for his voting record. What he might think privately is irrelevant. The only thing that really matters is what he votes for and against.
He’s anti-choice. He believes big banks are above the law. He supports deregulation in 2016. He supports the TPP. “Agrees with Sanders and Warren 95%” my ass.
He’s not anti-choice. Every time you say that, it makes you look like an idiot. There are more issues than deregulation and TPP. Many more. He agrees with your idols on pretty much all of those. Whining because he diverges on two issues (that as VP he will have almost no power to influence) is the sort of demand for ideological purity that destroys political parties as functional organizations.
I can’t say this enough.
In the Reagan election, everyone I knew was saying “there’s no way that idiot can get elected.” He did.
Same with GW Bush. “No one I know is going to vote for that half-wit.” Everyone we didn’t know did.
There are two Americas, and they compete at every election. If you don’t take it seriously, the other America will win.
“The Democratic party is really enjoying being the lesser of two evils way too much. It’s not only angering to its more progressive base, it’s also dangerous.”
THIS. When the DNC decided to put all of its support behind HRC it was pretty clear that they were not interested in running a progressive. Now HRC has picked another rightward leaning politician like herself as her VP. The republican swing to the extreme right has successfully pulled the democratic party towards that direction as well, leaving the center behind.
The Vicar @ 14:
“Again”?
Was anyone telling you Clinton was “so liberal” at any point?
Hell, I’m sure you’ve got plenty of quotes to that effect. Really.
Yep.
So long as you include the fact that the people you were telling were nodding and going “Yeah, we actually know that, thanks, though” when you told them.
I think the ultimate vindication of your prescient wisdom is the rising thread of amazement and horror in this thread, as Clinton supporters find themselves shocked – shocked, I tell you, shocked! – that she’d take a boring, tactical, centrist-at-best pick for VP.
Only you saw that coming. Really.
My previous comment’s stuck in moderation, but if a civil rights lawyer known as a strong advocate for POC in his home state, a long-time NRA opponent, and an anti-death penalty Catholic who, despite his religious beliefs, has a 100% rating from PP (among other things) isn’t fucking pure enough for Berni supporter I really don’t know what is.
I get the feeling that the Bernie Sanders supporters expected Bernie to be asked to be VP. Tantrum time now that it didn’t happen.
Oh, this was just posted, which says things about the choice of Kaine a lot more eloquently than I could.
A few excerpts:
And let’s be honest: President Obama was obliged to choose a white man as his running mate (in part) because of racism. People were (rightly) angry about that, but it wasn’t Obama’s fault. And Clinton was obliged to choose a white man as her running mate (in part) because of misogyny. People are (rightly) angry about that, too, but I’m seeing a lot more of the blame being directed at Clinton than I saw directed at Obama. And I’m not sure that’s fair. Because misogyny isn’t her fault any more than racism is President Obama’s.
To be frank, my thought was that anyone who was prepared to vote for a woman is prepared to vote for two women, or a woman and a man of color. (I also thought the same thing in 2008, replacing woman with Black man.) But friends around the country who are not professionally ensconced in a pro-Hillary bubble the way I am tell me that I’m wrong. That it still matters to a lot of the less progressive Democrats and independents they encounter that there’s a white dude on the ticket.
…
I will, however, give her credit for making an enormously important political calculation regarding a potential Democratic Senate majority, if the above wasn’t, in fact, a consideration. Senator Elizabeth Warren would have been replaced by a Republican governor in Massachusetts. Senator Cory Booker would have been replaced by a Republican governor in New Jersey.
…
(And, hey, she pushed Sanders left on Hyde; I’ve no doubt she can push Kaine left on choice if he needs pushing.)
I’m very excited about indications that my instinct about Kaine’s history taking on the NRA figured into Clinton’s decision. Clinton hasn’t gotten much credit for being bolder than past Democrats on gun reform during this election, but her willingness to give zero fucks about the NRA and campaign with mothers of Black people killed by guns is a big deal. It’s not a coincidence that there has been a Senate filibuster and a House sit-in by Democrats on gun reform since she launched her campaign. She seems very serious about gun reform, and it is even more reassuring to me regarding pursuing meaningful gun reform that she chose Kaine. I would very much like to see him lead on that.
Seriously, though, go read the whole thing!
The contest to become president is between Clinton and Trump.
That’s the only reason I’m voting Clinton.
There’s also the downstream math to consider. Whoever is picked for the VP slot would end up vacating their prior spot. Tim Kaine’s senate position is fairly well guaranteed to be replaced by another Democrat; some of the others in contention didn’t have that much of a probability, and could have ended up with a Republican instead.
I’ve now read through many of the comments on the Bernie for President reddit thread or whatever about the DNC emails, articles at the Intercept and elsewhere, and the Wikileaks twitter. My general impression – with a few exceptions of emails that should be followed up on, like the one about atheism* and those related to the social media activities of Sanders supporters/DNC critics – is that they’re not all that damning. They might even leave me a bit more sympathetic towards the DNC (!), given the blatant attempts by Wikileaks to portray them in the worst possible light, especially to Sanders supporters (see here, for example – this was part of a summary of comments on a Fox roundtable, not an admission; it’s one of several sentences or even parts of sentences removed from context and distorted). I haven’t read through the emails, but it seems many of them are just normal working communications among people doing their jobs. Wikileaks seems to have made no effort to sort through them or to protect anyone’s privacy.
I’m not a fan of DWS. I think she always favored Clinton, to be sure, and that she’s even more deceitful than usual for people in politics. But these emails (again, with some possible exceptions) don’t appear to tell us much that’s new about how party politics and the media work, and certainly not anything that makes the DNC stand out as especially corrupt. I don’t know what future emails released by Wikileaks will show, and they could be far worse, but this rollout by Wikileaks shows it to be far less a responsible revealer of truth than a purveyor of the same dishonesty and spin it purports to expose. It’s bad enough just to drop tens of thousands of emails on the internet with no thoughtful analysis of their content, but it’s even worse to do so with the cynical expectation that people won’t read them carefully and so will accept your misleading and manipulative claims about them. Makes it hard to believe they’re publishing these documents because they happened to get them, rather than doing the bidding of, say, Putin.
* (which Wikileaks naturally tweeted to Richard Dawkins; I guess no US atheists were seen as worthy of rabblerousing)
A Masked Avenger, #61
This is precisely why I have a feeling Trump will win easily.
Which is now the ONLY reason I’m voting for HRC. Again, the ONLY reason. That said, I want to make it perfectly clear that the next time anyone here complains about the Republicans take on foreign or economic policy, abortion/reproductive rights, or what have you, I WILL bring up this thread.
Virginia person here. I know that Tim Kaine was our governor for awhile and that he wasn’t terrible. That’s about all I can remember. Things just kinda…ran, business as usual. As OP says: Boring, boring, boring.
Zetopan-
The DNC and the 16 million people who voted for her, or course. The corruption is everywhere!
Bringing up religious tests being forbidden by the Constitution is the same as bringing up freeze peach
@59 Caturday Nite:
Treaties are around for longer. Clinton’s TPP deal will last longer than any supreme court appointees.
@60 carlie:
I’m sure she did. The problem is that we need to look at the bigger picture— choosing a right-wing DINO as VP is considered a good strategic move in no small part because Clinton can count on progressives voting for her no matter what. The problem is that because progressives can be counted on to vote for any Democrat under any circumstances, we are increasingly regarded as a political nonentity; since we “agree” with anything that any Democrat does, they have no need to listen to our concerns.
Mind you, the strategy is flawed— Gore nearly lost in 2000 by simply taking the progressive base for granted. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s what she’s doing and that the Democratic base will continue doing it until progressives revolt.
@66 Anri:
Practically nonstop.
@68 Troll:
Aw, did you forget you claimed to be one of those Bernie Sanders supporters not long ago? I guess that’s the trouble with being a concern troll— it’s hard to keep your lies straight.
For a couple of people who are rejecting that voters qua Citizens are acting in an official capacity when they vote, explain to me how voter based laws, such as the 38 states that banned same sex, are legally binding after the vote. I mean how can voters make law if they are not the state????
I have additional comments about this, but if we can’t settle this central issue it would be pointless.
Oh and Zenlike look up Rawls and public reason. He’s one of several philosophers I can name that take this line.
1. State laws set out the conditions under which referenda become laws
2. “no religious test” refers to a candidate’s qualifying to be listed on the ballot (and that the government can’t invalidate the will of the people post hoc)
3. if I’m employed by the state where’s my fucking paycheck
4. So explain to me exactly how I will be taken to court and what I will be charged under if I consider a candidate’s religion in whether I vote for them. How will you prove it?
5. Why don’t you then do something more useful than asinine moaning on this blog, Mike Smith, and go sue the vast majority of Americans who admit, in polls, that they won’t vote for an atheist or Muslim. That’s right, you won’t, because you know your stupid argument is shit anyway
Ruby @ # 69: … go read the whole thing!
I tried…
Pls take a good look at, or even click, your link.
@77
People are free to impose whatever religious test they want in their private affairs. If you don’t want to hang out with Catholics fine whatever. But voting is not a private act, its a public one. As such you owe it to your fellow citizens to act reasonable and not impose tests that can’t be agreed to by all from certain position.
Right now millions of voters refuse to vote for anyone who is not a specific type of Christian. That is also wrong. I’m only in a position to say that if I reject religious tests generally.
And for the record I think it is wrong (as in immoral) for anyone to vote in their immediate self-interest.
Afterall, being white, it’s in my immediate self-interest to keep racism as robust as possible so the white privilege I enjoy becomes more valuable. But clearly such thinking is indecent.
But that was the choice progressives were given in the primary, and Clinton won the primary over a more progressive candidate. The fact on the ground is that there are either a) more Democratic centrists than progressives, or b) there are other factors that Democratic voters consider more important than amount of philosophical progressivism, and she won on that (such as experience or actual policy recommendations or whatever). Or I guess c) that they weighed which progressive issues they cared more about; a good argument can be made that Bernie is more progressive on class issues but Hillary is more progressive on gender issues, for instance.
For those afraid of Trump winning, it’s a bit encouraging to reflect on the last time a truly bonkers candidate was up for election as president.
The famous buttons. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-22/barry-goldwater-buttons/7653278
The opinion piece. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-22/wolpe-republicans-in-cleveland:-we-have-seen-this-play-before/7652274
It doesn’t mean anyone can sit back comfortably and wait for things to play out. Goldwater was defeated by people relentlessly pointing out just what a vile utter nutter he was. (Or despicable creep or your insult of choice.)
@80
1. And state laws set out the conditions to send electors to various positions. I’m not seeing how this invalidates what I said.
2. The reasoning that we don’t have de jure tests also applies to de facto tests. I am stipulating that there is a difference. I am saying however the norms that prevent de jure test also should forbid de facto
3 roads, schools, military, police, etc.
4 I gave already stated that it is practically difficult to enforce this norm. It doesn’t follow from that that it isn’t a norm.
5. I am 100% consistent on this. It is wrong for a Christian conservative to not vote for Muslim qua Muslim, then it is wrong for a liberal atheist to not vote for a Catholic qua Catholic.
I would love to hear an argument from within the liberal tradition that rejects the first but embraces the second. I don’t think it can be done.
Pierce @ 82 *headdesk* I don’t even know how i managed to do that. Here you are: http://www.shakesville.com/2016/07/more-on-kaine.html
I agree with Bruce Carlson of myhistorycanbeatupyourpolitics.com that she needed an attack dog capable of filling the media space that Trump is going to fill, which she’s not good at. Like Elizabeth Warren. We’ll see how safe works out for her.
Lying liar Jake Harban
Wrong asshole. I never expected Sanders to be considered for VP. Hard to be disappointed when one is realistic.
Unlike those who support a political party with 2% polling for their presidential candidate. No realism there.
Wrong. The act of voting is public. Why you chose and marked your vote in private is your concern, with your own criteria coming into play. Facts aren’t your friend.
Elizabeth Warren will still play the attack dog part in Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She said so. There’s also the point to be made that taking her out of the Senate weakens the Democrats in the Senate. Warren said she wants to stay in the Senate.
Clinton said she is against TPP in its current form because it does not protect workers in the USA as it should. Clinton made a point of talking to Kaine about TPP. Kaine now agrees that he is also against it in its current form. Maybe not an ideal stance from the standpoint of Sanders’ supporters, but a good place to start a deeper discussion.
Planned Parenthood pays attention. They do not give 100% approval ratings to Senators casually. Cecile Richards (president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America ) confirmed Kaine’s 100% approval rating. Kaine is actually doing what we want religious people to do. He is keeping his personal anti-abortion religious stance separate from his support for a woman’s right to choose. From Richards’ Twitter feed:
Steve Benen of the Maddow Blog posted a few thoughts regarding Tim Kaine:
Tim Kaine has an “F” rating from the NRA.
Cecile Richards talks to Rachel Maddow about Tim Kaine. The video is 4:49 minutes long.
Nerd #89
What are you Trump now?
I mean, I get that you disagree with the guy, and I’m the last person to have a problem with slinging insults or whatever – but this is just –
Might as well go the whole way and just call him Lyin’ Jake, or Crooked Jake.
My first reaction: blah, the most boring choice. Warren would have been so much more fun.
Now I’m watching the press conference, and I’m reminded of a German word: “Rampensau” – “stage pig”. I don’t know his politics, but he seems born on the stage and connects with the audience like no other. This might be very beneficial to Clinton in the end. Well, like Biden basically.
I’ve been living in VA since 1994 (Oy vey!) and I can honestly say that Tim Kaine is an absolute non-entity here. Oh sure, he was Guv and now a senator, and I’m pretty sure I voted for him, but he’s one of those politicians who once he gets into office just kinda disappears from public view. I guess that’s good thing. Means he’s hard at work, right? A do no harm sort. I would’ve preferred Elizabeth Warren or Booker or Castro or Franken, but that would’ve been like adding a habanero pepper to the scrambled eggs. That’s all you would taste. Kaine is like a dollop of heavy cream, good, but not really needed.
Lynna @ 91
EXCEPT WHEN HE IS PASSING FORCED ULTRASOUND AND PARENTAL CONSENT BILLS, ACTS THAT WOULD SEND THE AVERAGE PHARYNGULITE INTO A SCREAMING FIT OF RIGHTEOUSN INDIGNATION WHEN THEY ARE DONE BY A REPUBLICAN POLITICIAN!!!
@Bob: Cream on eggs? Excuse me while I evacuate my bowels… noisily *urk*
No, just responding to someone who accused me of being a concern trolling Trump supporter on an earlier thread as I recognized he was showing the same attitude shown by the radicals back in my college days, with his arrogance, tap dancing, and use of slogans, in his support for his unelectable party. JH uses too much asinine hyperbole, and needs to tone down his inane accusations. Then I will tone down my rhetoric in response.
Tim Kaine is a civil rights lawyer whose private practice of over 20 years targeted housing discrimination against black people.
White progressives, naturally, are unsatisfied with his credentials. Color me unsurprised.
@nerd
Your choice for any elected official binds others to that choice. Your vote has policy consequences in ways that who you have over for dinner does not. As such it is of public concern who you are voting for and why. You do not get to dictate what happens to me without presenting reasons that are acceptable to me from a certain position.
Right now millions of white people are supporting Trump out of a sense of racial entitlement and resentment. If who a person votes for and why they vote for is private. Then I have no basis for condemning such actions.
So what will it be? Should I condemn racists racisting racism up by voting for a racist candidate and racist policies? Or should I shut up about it because voting us a private act? You can’t have this both ways.
I becoming more and more convinced that you are grossly incompetent in exercising the franchise.
@ #98
When did Kaine pass forced ultrasound bills? Former Governor Bob McDonnell signed Virginia’s ultrasound bill.
Because, of course, everyone that has a problem with an anti-choice catholic who was chosen to try and scrounge up dissatisfied conservatives must be white.
@nerd
By you own stated reasoning Stein supporters actions are private, ie no concern of yours.
Yet you are railing against voting for “unelectable” parties.
In short, you are a hypocrite.
@101
Yes because being outstanding on one social justice issue means he can’t be horrific in any other.
It’s true that Kaine is anti-abortion. But more importantly, he’s pro-choice, understanding that that isn’t a decision he can make for women. This sounds the kind of guy that will attack abortion at the source, preventing as many unwanted pregnancies as possible while never taking away a woman’s right to choose.
Nothing wrong with that.
So, this should move Virginia in to safer territory, also it’ll be interesting to see how he nudges North Carolina towards team Mystic… I mean, team blue…
A few more details about Tim Kaine:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/07/22/3801047/tim-kaine-hillary-vp/
It looks to me like progressives will find quite a bit to complain about in Tim Kaine’s past records of governing and voting, but less to claim about if you look at his record in the last few years. I hope this means that he is a man capable of learning. I’m reserving judgement for now.
Cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness thread.
Trump is using Clinton’s V.P. pick, Tim Kaine, to make another play for Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Trump still thinks that Sanders’ supporters will vote for him, despite what Bernie has been saying. (See comment 162 in the Moments of Political Madness thread for some of Bernie’s comments.)
Here are some of the comments Trump posted today:
Cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness Thread.
Bah, the Bernie Bro eternal sore losers are out in full force. Predictable.
Oh no, he’s a Catholic! Like that backwards, child-raping, pro-war Kennedy guy!
OH WAIT
@106
Yeah, to be fair to Kaine, he did cut funding for abstinence-only education (after making it part of his party platform no less), but this was after he did things like allocate funding to “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” and supported upholding the existing Virginia restrictions on abortion.
In the words of Stannis Baratheon, a good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good.
It’s commendable that he seems to have largely changed his view, but he was a real shit-show before then and I’m unhappy about having to vote for both a Presidential Candidate that spent most of her career trying to deny me rights based on my orientation, and a Vice-presidential candidate who spent a lot of his career trying to restrict abortion.
About as predictable as Applehead accusing people of being Bernie bros, even when they’re committed to voting for Hillary.
Want to throw in you usual homophobic/misogynist/transphobic comment while you’re at it?
Akira @98 is right. Tim Kaine has some negative baggage when it comes to reproductive rights for women. He seems to have grown out of the worst of that negative baggage:
Link
Tim Kaine has some work to do to reassure voters when it comes to his stance on reproductive rights.
a) my new favorite word.
b) Yes, he’s a much more engaging and dynamic speaker than I expected.
Once you quit being an asshole, you will realize what they do in the voting booth is their business. When they bring their voting preferences here and make it public, it is everybody’s business.
You lack context, which isn’t surprising, since you have no idea of how voting is really done, where the constitutional no religious test stops (with qualifying for the ballot by the government).
Show evidence to support this. No handwaving.
Your choice binds nobody else unless your choice is elected, which was also the choice of the majority of voters. Welcome to democracy.
Jake Harban @79:
Well, with a veritable cornucopia of quotes like that, I don’t see how anyone at all could doubt you.
TPP has come up a few times now, so…
Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondent’s Dinner:
“The greatest thing about [George W. Bush] is that he’s steady. You know where he stands,” Colbert said about Bush. “He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday — no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man’s beliefs never will.”
It’s not ALWAYS a good thing to never change positions. I can accept past mistakes as long as I see evidence that a person is correct in the present.
From what I can tell, on TPP, Clinton was a bit involved during her tenure at the Sate Department and seemed quite pleased with the idea of the deal they were working on (and made public statements to that effect). Then she left and negotiations continued, in secret, with her not a party to any of them.
When the full text was finally revealed, all 5,544 pages of it, it took some time for her to even figure out what the final deal looked like. And, then she started to have reservations. So, she talked to people, such as union leaders, to get their take on it and eventually decided that, despite her optimism for the idea of the agreement, the reality was unacceptable, and so she came out against it.
That’s actually a really, really trait for a potential leader to have.
Her opinion on Keystone seems similar. She was not against it when it existed as a theoretical idea and a bunch of promises from the corporations involved. But, when more details of the reality of the line came to light, as well as evidence that the corporate promises would not be kept, she turned against the idea.
Because Clinton is not perfect and she herself acknowledges that. So if you think she;s wrong, you’re welcome to try and change her mind and, if your position is valid and your evidence good, you may just succeed.
Everything I’ve seen so far suggests the same is true for Kaine.
Kaine seems to talk frequently about his experiences in Honduras and how they shaped him. He asked today during the Miami event if there were any Hondureños in the audience and waited for cheers. He did this standing next to, and as the running mate of, a person directly responsible in the coup that delivered Honduras to the vicious and reactionary rightwing oligarchy and American and Canadian corporate interests. The terror and death that has resulted is incalculable. Women, LGBT people, students and teachers, peasant and anti-mining activists, environmentalists, unionists, indigenous leaders, representatives of the political opposition, journalists,…have been oppressed, terrorized, and murdered. Democratic institutions have been wrecked and militarization and corruption have grown. Before she was murdered, Berta Cáceres publicly held Clinton responsible for the destruction of democracy in Honduras and the dangerous conditions in which she and others lived.
Clinton, whose friend Lanny Davis was the spin doctor for the coup-plotters, has expressed no remorse for her role (and even recently claimed that the coup was perfectly legal when she knows it wasn’t; she silently removed some passages from her book after the outrage). I can’t find any information about Kaine signing onto any of the calls to defend democracy and human rights in Honduras. Hondurans should use Kaine’s attention to the country to call out their “progressive” hypocrisy and push them to change.
Last Month, the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act was introduced in Congress, calling for the suspension of military and police aid and the investigation of these murders. Another environmental activist was assassinated less than two weeks ago.
Ruby @ 117
And a nominal contribution to the Clinton Foundation wouldn’t hurt.
Because it wasn’t “pragmatic” or “realistic” to find a Democratic politician whose position on abortion wouldn’t require reassuring the voters?
@#64, aaronpound
Damn right there are more than two issues. They fall into two groups: the ones which can destroy the lives of lots of people, either by reducing them to poverty or outright killing them, and the ones which can possibly kill a few people but mostly will just make people’s lives worse. Fracking, bank regulation, the TPP, military action in Syria, starting more wars, the Keystone XL Pipeline — these are the sorts of issues in the former group. Clinton and Kaine tend to be on the opposite side from me on them — Clinton has flip-flopped to my side on a few since Sanders entered the race, but I have absolutely no faith in her living up to her “new” stances — heck, the choice of Kaine signals that she is back on the side of the TPP, just for a start.
@#65, PZ Myers
Only two? There are at least 3. There are the very rich, the majority who — if polls are to be trusted — are significantly further to the left than either party (supporting single-payer, minimum wage increases, higher taxes on the rich, more regulation of Wall Street, etc.) but still often bigoted in one way or another, and the right wing, who are a minority but they turn out to vote.
The right wing believes they own the Republicans. The majority believe they own the Democrats. The very rich know they own both the Republicans and the Democrats, and they find people like you hilarious because you do most of their work for them by convincing yourself that the very rich aren’t your enemy.
@#66, zetopan
‘Scuse me, but the Democratic move to the right was actually driven by the Clintons. Go look up “New Democrats” and “Democratic Leadership Committee”. The Democrats could have resisted; I (and others) argue that they should have, and would have had more electoral success if they had. Basically, the “we had to move to the right to win” argument ignores the fact that the Democrats had control of Congress for forty years before they moved to the right, and lost it almost immediately after they started to move rightward.
@#67, Anri
Go back a few threads. Both Diane and Nerd of Redhead were making the claim repeatedly. But if you’re too lazy to do that, Ruby at comment 70 quotes a big stretch, which she agrees with, which suggests that Clinton will push Kaine left. Yeah, sure, whatever.
Considering that most of them have been claiming that No Really Hillary Has Moved Left Because Of Sanders, yes, if they’re honest then they would be shocked to find that her VP pick is right-of-center in economic and foreign policy. Now ask me if I think Clinton supporters are honest. Go on.
@#69, Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
I certainly didn’t. After Bernie Sanders ran on a platform of economic justice, the DNC has to prove that it is wholly dedicated to the interests of the rich, lest they lose their precious, precious funding, which means Sanders and anyone who agrees with him has to be kicked to the curb. Warren was never going to be picked, either, no matter how much she acts as a Clinton proxy — fighting against the payday loan ripoff industry? She’ll be lucky if she isn’t primaried.
The Kaine pick was Clinton saying loud and clear to Wall Street “we will do absolutely anything to make sure you continue to control the White House”, and I’m sure the message was received.
@#73, SC (Salty Current)
The DNC is officially not supposed to favor any candidate’s nomination. It’s in their own rules. It’s not surprising that they don’t always obey those rules — people are people, not machines — but to get confirmation of the suspicion that the rules to be broken blatantly, and on the orders of the person in charge, is pretty damning.
If, as Clinton apologists like you claim, Clinton would have won fair and square anyway, then this was an incredibly foolish move. Trump tells lies all the time, but when he says “the game was rigged against Sanders by the Democratic Party”, and it turns out to be true, it gives him credibility — and since he says a lot of things about Clinton, that’s not something you want. And that’s the best case scenario for these revelations — if Clinton could not have won without Debbie Wasserman-Shultz’s thumb on the scales, then the party is absolutely beyond redemption and Clinton not only will lose the general election but deserves to lose it beyond question.
@#77, sigaba
Clinton reversed several of her positions (such as her prior support for the TPP, now making a comeback) to try to appear to be as liberal as Sanders. If those positions weren’t honest, but still influenced a large proportion of voters — and I assure you that the majority of Clinton voters I know in real life liked her stolen-from-Sanders positions a lot better than her original ones — then what does that say about the legitimacy of her win? (Or, alternatively, if you are a cynic who says that nobody should believe what a politician says, about the intelligence of her supporters?)
@#79, rpjohnston
I think the problem is even deeper than that. There are enough people who are eligible to vote but who don’t (either unregistered-though-eligible or registered-but-nonvoting) to immediately decide an election — more of them exist than voted for either party in any of the last 4 presidential campaigns. (Usually the statistics only count registered voters, which understates the problem.) If all the nonvoters went to the polls and wrote in a candidate, that candidate would win. The numbers are simply overwhelming.
These people have been on the increase for decades. This might have happened anyway, but polls suggest that a majority of the public is, if anything, to the left of the Democrats on major policy issues. The Democrats, in other words, could win big if they got people to vote.
The Democratic strategy of embracing “lesser of two evils” and moving to the right to capture corporate cash — which was pretty much the DLC thing, of which the Clintons were major members, Bill was even the Chairman — makes it clear to anyone who pays attention that voting for the Democrats does not work. You do not get a better deal when a Democrat gets in the White House, because although the Republicans have descended into lunacy and incompetence the amount of difference in policy between the modern Democrats and Reagan-era Republicans is vanishingly small. Anyone who regularly reads a newspaper (or otherwise follows the issues) notices that the Democrats just aren’t worth supporting any more.
This “calculation” about ignoring the base to pursue Wall Street money and a relative handful of hypothetical “moderate Republican” votes — which don’t really exist any more — presumes that nobody will get discouraged and stop voting, but in reality it is happening, and will only happen faster because of “strategic” thinking like this. And someone who stops voting because they genuinely believe the parties are worthless is very difficult to get back into action. Trust me, it is a million times better for the Democrats for people to jump ship to the Greens than it is for them to stop voting entirely — neither one is better than the other in terms of improving the vote count in the current election, but you can lure Green Party voters back with relative ease — at least, you can if you get rid of people like the Clintons. You just need to run compelling candidates and shoot for not just being “the lesser of two evils”. It takes much more work to get someone who thinks that voting itself is a waste of time to come and vote for a Democrat.
But the Democrats (and absolute imbeci— oh, sorry, we’ll be somewhat polite, party loyalists like Nerd of Redhead) don’t understand that, and then wonder why turnout is so low, and people like Romney can still come close to winning.
There’s a Japanese proverb: “only death cures fools”. I hope it’s wrong, but the Democrats sure seem bent on proving it.
@#84, carlie
You forgot d) Clinton lied about her actual positions (as she really did, vide her re-turnaround on the TPP) to seem more liberal than she actually is. And e) the media presented Clinton as the inevitable winner and often refused to even let Sanders have airtime unless he paid for it, which definitely led to Clinton wins in some primaries. (In those “firewall” southern states, exit polls showed 75+% of Clinton voters admitting they didn’t even know who Sanders was, they just voted for Clinton because they had heard of her and therefore assumed she must be better. Way to go, guys!)
@#93, Lynna, OM
Meaningless. Bernie Sanders, who has voted against gun control (one of the issues on which I disagree with him), also gets an “F” rating.
The Planned Parenthood ratings (and so forth) are also semi-meaningless. Sanders and Clinton had the same ratings from Planned Parenthood. That didn’t stop anyone in the Clinton camp from insinuating that Sanders was somehow less committed to reproductive rights than Clinton — or Planned Parenthood’s leadership from endorsing Clinton. If there was a reason to endorse Clinton, what’s the point of the ratings?
It’s not unlike the Congressional Black Caucus, which recently mostly voted against measures which would have prevented more police shootings of black people. Who cares what they think as a matter of identity politics if they can’t even live up to their identity?
@#109, applehead
Perhaps you can tell me why Democrats love Kennedy so much. I’ve never understood it; he was a mediocre president who doubled down on Vietnam (which started off as something we could have pulled out of easily with no consequences), and was willing to set off the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he’s always seemed to me — I didn’t live through the era — to be kind of sleazy, and not too bright.
Come to think of it, Kennedy’s kind-of-stupid overestimation of American power and influence and ability to dictate global policy is very similar to Hillary Clinton’s.
So if you think she;s wrong, you’re welcome to try and change her mind and, if your position is valid and your evidence good, you may just succeed.
I’m not rich enough.
Sanders’ most recent rating was a D-. He’s gotten as high as a C-. Yes, it would be nice if the bar for getting an F was higher, but it appears that Kaine is better than Sanders on this specific issue.
Source re Sanders’ rating: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/20/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-nra-report-card-d-minus-most-recent/
@nerd
1) you already demonstrated how a voters’ is binding. By helping the politico get to 50%+1 to support you have helped give him the power to rule. You better have a damn better reason than the other guy is catholic for opposing Trump.
2) it makes no moral difference if a person expresses they are voting for Stein or merely do so quietly. That isn’t the public/private distinction at play here. I think you are literally too stupid to follow why that is.
If a person expresses that they are going to have their kid take first communion in a public park to a friend that is still a private action as it doesn’t concern the business if the state.
3) you do realize that tyranny if the majority us a thing we have to be worried about right? Large majorities did favor and support Jim Crow, slavery, the same sex marriage bans, anti choice restrictions, etc. Were not such out comes unjust? Did people of color not have a right to complain and treat as illegitimate Jim Crow despite that the white majority favored so “separate but equal”?
You shouldn’t vote. You seem to have no idea how to got about the basic problems of governance.
The de jure no religious test clause is rendered toothless if we, also, do not discourage de facto religious tests by voters. While the Constitutional clause only prevents a de jure test to keep x religious faith from being denied ballot access, if voter, de facto, prevent religious x adherents from holding office because they are members of religion x the clause is pointless. A Jew (as an example) can make the ballot, and then proceed to lose ever time.
Further to even make it on the ballot you need to get X number of signatures from voters. If voters are allowed to subject people to religious test once they are on the ballot because voters are not acting officially for the state (even through they totally are), what is preventing voters for applying a de facto test at the petition stage? if nothing, what does the no religious test clause even mean?
@ #126
If voters are allowed? Just how do you propose to allow or not allow voters to bring their individual prejudices to the voting booth. Your whole argument makes no sense.
It means exactly what it says, ” but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” How can that be so hard to understand?
Try losing your legal verbage. I don’t think you know what it means.
Article six, US constitution.
This originally only applied to the US President, House, and Senate, but after the fourteenth amendment, it also applied to state governments, and their subgoverning bodies. There is no religious test in order to run for any elective governmental office by the Government. It does not apply to individuals.
Nobody is required to sign a petition. Being voluntary, any criteria I want can come into play. If somebody wants me to sign a petition to get candidate AR on the ballot, and they have religious pins on their apparel, and upon questioning, candidate AR is a flaming religious right asshole, I can tell them to go away. Nothing unconstitutional in doing so.
Absent that, I do tend to sign petitions to get people onto the primary ballots. The more the merrier.
You are wrong in thinking signing a petition means later support. It doesn’t.
You are very confused about the political process. Have you ever taken a civics class? I knew all about this fifty years ago in high school. And been reading politics since.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/listen-to-tim-kaines-im-conservative-radio-ads-from-2005?utm_term=.qq9Ow1aow#.wxZ2VmZEV
He is so progressive! Fucking hypocrites.
“I’m Tim Kaine, I’m running for governor and I’m not afraid to tell you where I stand. My opponent Jerry Kilgore has just come out with even more negative ads. Once again he’s hiding behind a slick radio announcer to distort my record. I’m conservative on issues of personal responsibility. As a former Christian missionary, faith is central to my life. I oppose gay marriage, I support restrictions on abortion — no public funding and parental consent — and I’ve worked to pass a state law banning partial birth abortion. Jerry Kilgore knows this the real difference is Attorney General Jerry Kilgore promoted a law banning partial birth abortion that he knew was unconstitutional. He played politics with abortion and as a result Virginia still has no ban. As governor, I’ll always put principle over politics and you’ll always know where I stand. That’s who I am and what I believe. I’m Tim Kaine, candidate for governor and this ad was paid for by Kaine for governor.”
“I’ll enforce the death penalty as governor and I’m against same-sex marriage. I’m conservative on personal responsibility, character, family and the sanctity of life. These are my values, and that’s what I believe.”
I’ve been spending some time trying to convince american friends to vote for Clinton. With no hyperbole at all, I genuinely fear global war if Trump gains the presidency , especially since we in the UK have already failed to recognise the value of stability in Europe.
This is not going to help my case. Every vote Clinton is in danger of losing to a third or fourth candidate (or losing to apathy) comes from someone who believes that establishment politics is more of a danger to the US than the orange goon.
@129, notsont
That’s from over ten years ago. People in the comments here have already pointed out his change from back then to more recent times. Hopefully he really has changed.
dianne wrote:
Unrelated to what you said, but related to the link: Politifact sure goes out of their way to find fault with statements said by progressives and liberals. That statement about Sanders getting a D- is only ranked as “Mostly true” because he’s had other grades (both better and worse), and the NRA hasn’t released new grades for him since 2012 (they don’t grade for primaries). They seemed very adept at finding similar faults with Obama’s statements during the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, too.
@tomh
Yes allowed, as in morally allowed, as in having it acceptable behavior to bring in individual prejudice into the voting booth, How is that remotely OK?
As for enforcing the duty my idea is what I am doing; speaking out against the rank prejudice of voters subjecting a politico to a religious test.
The no religious clause is intended to make it the case that an adherent of any religion is eligible for office, which is has to be why the constitution goes out of its way to include this clause and make it Quaker friendly. However, it does no good to ban merely formal tests; if voters refuse, en mass, to vote for a Jew qua Jew then elected offices are not in fact open to all religious groups and the no formal test in ineffective.
What does it matter if an atheist cannot be excluded from the ballot if voters systematically excludes atheists from holding office?
If you hold that voters can apply a religious test, you might as well go whole hog and allow only majority religions on the ballot, de jure, and remove the no religious test clause. Right now it is impossible for an atheist qua atheist in this country to be elected president. The reason being that there is a slew of bigoted people who will not vote for an atheist qua atheist. That is wrong. It is wrong because you shouldn’t subject politicos to a religious test.
@Nerd
Let’s start with the obvious. You can’t read. NOTHING I said can be twisted to mean “You are wrong in thinking signing a petition means later support. It doesn’t.” I never commented on anything that even remotely implies that. At best, I implied that the petition stage requires nominal support of a candidate appearing on the ballot…which in my mind is everyone as I always sign when asked for anybody.
Second, I have not only taken a civics class, I fucking teaching political philosophy at that the collegiate level. So you can take that line of questions and blow it out of your ass.
Second, the FORMAL requirements of the no religious test clause is that the gov’t cannot prevent any religious group from trying to make the ballot (or remove a person from the ballot for their religious views) FORMALLY the clause renders direct questions about religious faith null and void for the FORMAL requirements of any office at the federal level prior to the 14th amendment and all officers after that vis-a-vis incorporation doctrine. SUBSTANTIALLY the clause is intended to render all offices of trust ACTUALLY open to all persons of any faith. That anyone, regardless of religious sect, faith or lack there of, has a SUBSTANTIAL chance of getting elected.
Imagine for a second that a Jewish (or an atheist, or preferred sect) person lives in an area in which the vast majority of voters refuse to either vote for or sign the petition to get on the ballot for anyone Jewish only in light of the person being Jewish. Is the person in a position where they have a SUBSTANTIAL chance of getting elected? Or even on the ballot? Clearly not.
So, in such a case, a person is facing a de facto religious test–they are being barred, as a matter of fact, from that office only in light of their religious views. As such it is 1) wrong, 2) unjust, and 3) insofar as you agree that voters are acting as agents of the state when they vote/petition it is unconstitutional.
You stated behavior of refusing to sign a religious righter’s ballot drive, while signing all others, is abhorrent. You are unjustly subjecting people to a different standard because of their religious views. You are, in short, a bigot and unreasonable. Good day to you.
That is some of the worst logic I’ve ever seen. Obviously, voters can apply any test they want, or none at all, or just close their eyes and pick a name at random. That has nothing to do with the legal requirements of who may qualify to run for office. I can’t believe you’re serious. I give up.
@tomh
Is voting a moral act or not? I’m serious because if you think it is proper for voters to pick names at random then you are treating the act of voting wrong and treating the question too flippantly.
It is true that voters are capable of applying any test they want, but it doesn’t follow from that we have to accept (as in not try to persuade out of or hold it moral) any test that a random voter devises; Anybody who is voting for Trump is morally wrong (and more over unreasonable and illegitimate) regardless of the test they used to reach that conclusion.
I am clearly saying it is wrong for any voter to hold a politico to a religious test. I am further saying that the FORMAL legal requirement of not having Jews (or atheist) barred from any office is useless if it is SUBSTANTIALLY difficult-impossible for a Jew (or atheist) to get elected because there are widespread bigoted attitudes among voters that hold politicos to an informal/de facto religious test.
What the hell? I’m discussing what people are capable of doing. I’m discussing what they ought to do. Explain to me what the point of the FORMAL requirement is if it is not to ensure all faiths have a SUBSTANTIAL chances of being elected.
in 135 “I’m discussing what people are capable of doing.”
should read “I’m NOT discussing what people are capable of doing.”
Sorry, I don’t believe you without a link to your faculty web site. You lie and bullshit too much to be taken seriously. You either put up or shut the fuck up.
Irrelevant to the Government making the decision. Where the fuck is your mind? It isn’t working, if you don’t know the difference between government and personal decisions.
WRONG. The Government isn’t the one making the determination. Which is why you are full of shit, and an asshole. The clause only refers to the Government. Not individuals.
You are welcome to your fuckwitted opinion, but I dismiss that as a non-sequitur. My choice, not yours.
Try showing real intelligence in your arguments. Which means understand the different roles and rules for the Government and Individuals.
First, let’s get something straight: as I’m fairly sure I’ve told you in the past, I am not a Clinton supporter, much less an apologist. I’m not a Liberal or a Democrat. I’m an anarchist, and I find election years frankly annoying because people devote so much hope and anger and energy to the system of representative democracy and politicians as opposed to independent activism and direct action, allowing their concerns to be shaped by politicians’ and parties’ priorities rather than by a sustained analysis of the capitalist-imperialist system.
My strategy for general-election voting, and what I recommend, is to vote for the best of the realistic options, with special attention to keeping the most dangerous – fascist, authoritarian, theocratic – candidates out of office. Voting is primarily a defensive measure, and a small part of a larger strategy. The right to vote is nothing to sneeze at, but there’s nothing sacred about it, and in an election in which there are only two candidates with a realistic choice of winning, a self-righteous protest vote or a vote for a third party by someone on the Left does fuck-all to advance leftwing goals and helps the Right, as does the incessant hectoring of those planning to vote for the relatively leftwing candidate.
(I also think some Democratic candidates, including Clinton, can accomplish some positive things related to domestic policy that can make a real difference in people’s lives. I don’t think all candidates or politicians are inherently evil, and I do believe they can sometimes be pushed in the right direction.)
Second, you might have noticed that I’m the one who raised the subject of the emails here. That hardly suggests I wanted to dismiss the matter. After I posted about it, I went – following links provided by Wikileaks – to the sites most likely to find the most damning emails. So far, my assessment is that the emails aren’t especially damning. The ones I’ve seen highlighted (with a few possible exceptions) don’t show rigging or fingers on the scales. They show normal machine-party politics and an often petty anger at accusations of active institutional (vs. personal) bias. I also saw a good deal of misrepresentation by Wikileaks and a willingness to accept this misrepresentation among Sanders supporters, which made me suspicious and angry.
I wouldn’t shed a tear if DWS were removed from her position (well, maybe a small one for a woman fired who’s likely to be replaced by a similar man). I didn’t see anything in this batch that would require her removal, but I wouldn’t argue against it and I don’t know what future batches might reveal. I’m open to being convinced – I just haven’t seen strong evidence of malfeasance so far. I think everyone knew DWS had a personal bias towards Clinton, that she’s not exceptionally honest, and that DNC rules institutionally pose barriers for “outsider” candidates.
Listen to what you’re saying. You’re insinuating that these emails show not only DWS’s personal bias but her thumb on the institutional scale, and even that this was the cause of Clinton’s primary victory. Even if I accepted the first part, the second wouldn’t follow; nor would it necessarily say anything about Clinton. Then you go on to say hyperbolically that this suggests that the entirety of the Democratic Party is therefore “beyond redemption,” which somehow means that Clinton will lose and deserves to lose the general election, not to Sanders, but to fucking Trump. The DNC isn’t just bad, but worse than the RNC – whose internal emails haven’t been published – and so terrible their candidate should lose to a fascist. Even if this weren’t convoluted reasoning, it would be crazy. Arguing that someone “deserves to lose” an election serves no useful purpose, and suggesting that anything the DNC has done means that Trump should be handed victory is just mindboggling.
You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t understand your purpose here. I think we probably cross-posted above, but I wrote about the Honduran blood on Clinton’s hands and suggested that this is a good moment for activism. You seem more interested in feeling superior to “Clinton apologists” and mocking their perceived faith in her, but there are few of those here. The primary is over. This general election is a real thing – not a stage for your personal morality play. You’ve spent a lot of time posting, but I don’t know what you hope to accomplish other than helping a fascist be elected to the presidency of the United States. I think I’m done responding to you, since you’re tiresome and your comments pointless.
So I’m at the mall with the kids so they can catch Pokemon. On a TV is Fox News. They’re showing an awful lot of “Former Sanders supporters now voting for Trump” lately.
SC (Salty Current) #138
Have you written somewhere what your position is in terms of anarchy – how anarchy would work in practice and why you consider it desirable?
Not looking to derail, so just wondering if there is a link if you have discussed it before, here or elsewhere.
@Nerd
I don’t have a faculty website as I am an adjunct. The college I teach at is Prairie State College in Chicago Heights, IL. I do have an MA from UChicago. I’m more than willing to provide a photo (I guess?) if you provide an email. I’m not revealing my real name in this context.
Second, in our system where does the government get its authorization to impose order? Why is it legitimate for the gov;’t to tax (as an example) individuals? What are the god damn first lines of the Constitution? Is it not WE THE PEOPLE? Why do we even vote?
Third do you understand what de jure and de facto even mean?
Forth, I am well aware that individuals can have different roles, or that their is a difference between nonstate actions (private) vs state actions (public). If you want to oppose a religious test on who you want to be a friend with, or what business to utilize, or what charities to support, go right ahead every one of those decisions is private. Voting, because gov’t authority is derived from the consent of the people, i.e. voting, is not a private act. It’s a public one.
you god damn blighted fuckwit.
SC:
I rarely comment, but after your tour de force (#138), I just wanted to take a moment to express my appreciation. Were I to take the time to cohere my inchoate thoughts on AmeriCirkus ’16, I could only wish to do half so well as you did here.
It’s like the good old days.
In the above oppose a religious test should read impose a religious test RE: friends
SC (Salty Current) wrote:
I’d rather see DWS lose her job because she supported things like the payday loan industry (i.e. legal loan sharks) rather than over something like this. Political shenanigans over the 2016 primaries may have damaged one person’s political aspirations, but her support for those predatory practices actively ruined hundreds of thousands of lives (if not millions).
Oh, and thanks to Ruby, and Lynna for the updated info on Kaine. Glad to see he outgrew his prior “Family Values” tendencies.
@nerd
I’m going to try a slightly different track. This is compatible with everything I have said.
You seem to think, weirdly, that voting is a mere private decision. That it is akin to what sort of career an individual is seeking. I have been raking my brain and I can’t for the life of me understand where on earth you are getting that. Why do you consider voting a mere personal?
Because from where I sit your vote either affects how I will be treated if your side wins or is an attempt to affect my life if your guy loses. It is of supreme importance who is elected president is public–it concerns the heart of state action–as it is a public decision. Who you vote for is not in the same category as what you will gave for dinner. The reasons for select x politico or policy must be able to be justied all from a certain position, especially those negatively.
Case in point: in 2006 WI pass a same sex ban with ~54% of the vote. Being queer such a ban damaged my life in formal and informal ways to a great extent. Should I have shrugged my shoulders and went “I can’t comment! The voters decisions were private! Must not judge!”
Or should I have done what I did which is condemn the voters for doing something that damaged my life without reasons that were acceptable to from certain position.
I’m asking plainly is voting an act that carries moral weight?
@89, 100 Troll:
Ooh, nice try moving those goalposts.
Try reading my original post— I said you claimed to be a Sanders supporter, not that you claimed Sanders would be chosen as VP.
Nope. I don’t think you support Trump; I think you’re an establishment Republican who would rather vote for an establishment DINO than a usurper Republican. You’re definitely a concern troll— everything you say to me is some variation on the concept of: “As a conservative, I have a few concerns about how liberals are pursuing liberal policies and I think they should follow my advice…”
That is the definition of a concern troll.
You think anyone to the left of Bush is a communist/Marxist/radical hippie. That you are a neocon is self-evident.
More lies.
Another lie. I’m not a member of the Green Party. I don’t belong to the Green Party. I don’t support the Green Party.
LOL! Pots and kettles in glass houses, dude.
You think it’s “unrealistic?” Then put your money where your mouth is.
I’ll bet you $1,000 that I’ll be voting for Stein in November. If you think it’s that “unrealistic” then feel free to step up for the easy payday.
@146 Mike Smith:
It seems you are stuck inside an absurd false dichotomy where every action or decision a person can make falls into one of two categories: “Private” acts which are completely exempt from criticism and completely above any sort of rule, and “public” acts for which no restriction is illegitimate. Accordingly, you argue that either (a) elections are “private” and criticizing voters is immoral, or (b) elections are “public” and voting freely is immoral. This is, of course, complete and utter bullshit.
So to recap:
(a) The constitutional ban on religious tests for office does not apply to individual people’s votes.
(b) There is no law forbidding voters from imposing a private religious test on their own decision.
(c) Voting on an irrational basis (including refusal to vote for someone because of their private and harmless religious beliefs) is a bad thing, however…
(d) …it is virtually impossible to detect, completely impossible to ban or punish, and basically unavoidable; it’s a major failure mode of democracy, but one no other form of government has ever been better at averting.
Mike Smith, you’d probably be a lot happier in life if you didn’t feel the incessant need to determine whether things are objectively ‘indecent’. Maybe look up relativism, and relax while learning about how morality isn’t an absolute, no matter what your former religion said.
Commentators are saying DWS is basically out, so that’s a step in the right direction. Jeff Weaver will be on AM Joy on MSNBC within the hour, at 11:00 Eastern time.
Thanks for asking (and thanks, Arren, for the nice words!). There’s nowhere I’ve condensed it into a single statement (it’s an aspect of a book I’m writing but not the central focus). I generally refer people to Kropotkin, whose works can be read online. The piece by Luigi Fabbri that I link to in this post is also great. Since last year, I’ve written primarily about Rojava and its system of “democratic confederalism.”* There’s always the danger of romanticizing them, especially when information is so hard to come by. But I honestly think that what they’ve accomplished and continue to accomplish is amazing.
* They’re influenced by the work of Murray Bookchin, who isn’t my favorite anarchist – he tended to adopt Kropotkin’s ideas while claiming wrongly that Kropotkin had argued against them. But the ideas themselves are good.
I already said the act of voting is a public act. But both my vote and your vote is done by a secret ballot and is a private affair (unless you or I make it public like on this blog), using whatever criteria I decide is relevant, and the government cannot control what criteria I use. That criteria could include religious bigotry, racism, misogyny, etc. You haven’t shown any law at any level that says otherwise, that applies to individuals, not the government.
I have voted since ’72, and in every case there was no way to tie my vote to my name. I’ve voted using old style paper ballots, voting machines, punch cards with potential hanging chads, and now using optical reading paper ballots. In all cases there has been an effort for a modicum of privacy while doing the actual voting, and now I’m given the ballot in a security folder, and after filling it out, take the ballot in its security folder that covers my vote, but not the election judges marks, over to the optical reader and the election judge at the reader lets me insert it into the reader, which reads the ballot as it pulls it out of the folder. Nobody at the facility knows who I voted for. That is what is meant by a secret ballot (can’t get more private), as you should know.
To recap, my act of showing up to vote is public, my actual votes are private, using whatever criteria I deem appropriate, just like my neighbors, who may decide differently than I do. Everybody’s aggregate votes decide the elections. Which is why voting in every election is important.
Not weirdly. The difference is in showing up to actually vote (public act), and the actual marking of the secret ballot with my choices (private act). If you can’t and won’t tell the difference, you are a terrible teacher and should quit and find another job.
Welcome to democracy. Your candidate/party won’t always win. Been there, done that, survived. You can’t control how other people vote. My vote may or may not matter to you, but it is MY decision, not yours. You don’t like that? Your problem, not mine.
Yes, who wins does effect what happens. I’m retired, so medicare and social security are important considerations to me these days. I’m voting accordingly.
Do something active instead of doing existential moaning and making an obnoxious ass of yourself. Which is why you need to work on getting the vote out for the party you favor. If you want the democrats to win, call up the local party and offer to man phone banks to get people to vote, transport people to the polling places on election day, or work to allow shut-ins to vote-by-mail by downloading applications, and getting them to sign the application, and mailing it in.
The Redhead is a shut-in, and I have my calendar marked as to when I will apply for vote-by-mail for her.
You are at a blog that is actually friendly to LGBTQ. Yet you are treating us like we are the enemy with your whining and attempts to limit voting. Doesn’t go over well, and you need to change that.
Incidentally, this week is the fourth anniversary of the Rojava Revolution. In the worst possible circumstances, they’ve opened schools and universities, held film and short-story festivals, and worked ceaselessly to build a radically democratic culture. The Rojava parliament, described by artist Jonas Staal, is truly inspiring:
(more here)
Here’s an article from the other day at HuffPo, criticizing Bernie Sanders for his lack of attention to the Kurds and Rojava and calling on him to raise the subject during the convention:
@jake
In order for it to be a false dichotomy you need to demonstrate there is a viable third options. You have merely asserted that it is.
You can start by recognizing that my dichotomy is limited in scope to voting for political offices and impactful laws.
There are of course voting cases where the decision isn’t either, really, private or public because the impact on others is so low it doesn’t really matter. I.e. New Zealand voting for new flag, voting to get rid of the penny.
But the context of this conversation is voting for us president (well Veep) a decision of such grave importantance you are going to need something more than there is a third option!!!
Voting behavior is obviously constrained to degree the govt is and more broadly constrained to what sort of treatment may be imposed on human beings. It is clearly wrong to vote, directly or indirectly, to abridge the 1st amendment or more to the point vote to repeal the 1st amendment. Human beings require certain treatment from everyone and that 95% vote in favor of the ill treatment does not justify violating said standards of treatment In short, the Uganda kill the gay bill was wrong and any voter who directly or indirectly voted for it has blood on their hands.
I again ask the basic questions of: where does ultimate authority rest in our system? What are the first words of the constitution? Are you aware that tyranny of the majority is a thing right?
Voting is not completely free because our treatment of other s is constrained. It is immoral for me to purphosely kill you not in self-defense and it is immoral to vote for you to be killed not self-defense via the state.
What this amounts to is a certain range of voting test/behavior that is reasonable–acceptable to all from a certain position–and as such moral voting occurs in that range.
I cannot justify voting, directly or indirectly, for Jim Crow laws to a person of color because it is irrational to accept your life prospects to be damaged in that way.
I again ask you the very basic question is voting (for president/laws) an action that has moral import? If not why not?
Now:
A/B amount to the formal ban being only de jure. Something I have repeatedly acknowledge. It does not address my substantial concerns if we do not make problematic a de facto religious test by individual voters.
C agrees with me that individual religious test is a bad thing, meaning your entire response to me was pointless.
D it doesn’t follow from the difficulty of preventing the behavior that the behavior is acceptable or needs to not be called out when it is observed. It is extremely hard to detect and persecute date rape…I guess should end rape awareness campaigns then?
I have not called for police to round up voters who vote unreasonably. I have only ever argued that the behavior us wrong (because it is) and we need to call it out when we see it and not engage in it ourselves.
You vastly overestimate the difficulty of when people do subject politicos to a religious test. Bigots tebd to rather loud in their bigotry. Did you miss 2012 when Romney was, grossly and unfairly, subjected to religious tests left right and center? Did you miss Nerd plainly admitting that Nerd doesn’t sign petitions for overtly religious people?
@CaitueCat
What would make me happy is for people to stop telling me to look up basic concepts from my field. I know of relativism, and related positions such as subjectivism. I have read the ur-texts for the position (can you even name them?). I don’t agree with it ultimately and it is not the dominant position. And certainly the naive version you are implying is laughable.
@nerd
Holy fucking shit. You are a gid damn idiot.
@nerd
Holy fucking shit. You are a god damn fucking moron. What you just said is fractually wrong. I can’t believe that is the line you are taking. Look fuckwit the private vs public distinction you are using is this:
Private: others do not know.
Public: others do know.
The private-public distinction I’m using is this:
Public: is a legitimate concern of others and/or the state.
Private: is not a legitimate concern of others and/or the state.
It’s absurdly easy to generate case examples to show the difference.
Case 1: right now I can go to a sex club and have sex in front of a ton of people. This would be a public act in your sense but a private act in mine.
Case 2: a company could be dumping a toxic sludge into the commons (ie a river) secretly at night. This private act by your sense but a public sense by mine.
Or too put the point more strongly the outside of my house is private property you blinkered fucknugget imbecile despite it being on google maps and thus visually accessible to all.
Your sense of private vs public has almost, but not quite, nothing to do with what we are talking about, you dollar store stooge. That you cast your ballot under conditions of secrecy has fuck all to do with it being a public act in the moral sense you unbelievably dense tin pot thinker.
@ Mike Smith
You seem to think that your opinion of right and wrong forms some sort of objective morality that everyone should agree with. You are wrong. I believe that a religious test is a perfectly sound reason for a voter to decide how to vote. I would never vote for a follower of the Scientologist religion for that reason alone, regardless of their position on any other issue. It sounds like from your lofty moral position that would be a reprehensible act.
@tomh
I’m taking the line that for normative questions (question concerning how we should treat others and ourselves) that there are correct answers. Now these might answer might be correct in the same sense as 1+1 = 2 (objective, fact) is correct or maybe they are correct in the same way the theory of evolution is correct as the best explanation for all available evidence, or again may be the answers are simple rules we all agree to abide are correct because “we” say they are (a bit like balls/strikes in baseball). Now you can disagree with this assessment, but 1) I am taking the dominant position within philosophy and 2) I have no desire to have a metaethical discussion in this thread. So we have reached an impasse if you take that line.
Now it doesn’t follow from the above that I am necessarily correct on any particular judgment I have made on normative questions. I remain open to being demonstrated as wrong. You merely asserting that it is a “sound reason” to subject a politico to a religious test is not a demonstration. Why is it proper to subject a religious test to a politico?
I think it is wrong for two clusters of reasons.
1) the reasonableness considerations: Our political culture grants liberty of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of speech etc. This means we provide a political culture that allows for a near infinite amount of differing conception of the good. As such we, given that all people are free and equal, need to keep all positions of authority open to all, regardless of their conception of the good, as all are governed by laws. Religion X should not be systematically excluded from positions by voters because Religion X is governed by law. It is profoundly unfair to expect Catholics (as an example) to obey laws they are substantially excluded from making.
2) rational considerations: If we grant that voters are proper to subject politicos to a religious test then I have “weaponize” voting against my own interests. Namely, I am no longer in a position to complain that Christians, en masse, have excluded atheist qua atheist from the halls of power. I don’t want my atheism held against me in the public sphere, and yet if I hold religious tests are proper I am condoning that sort of behavior. This is irrational.
Now you might disagree with that, but bully for you. Convince me I am wrong or yes I do find it reprehensible that you refuse to vote for a Scientologist qua Scientologist.
By the same “logic”, one should not vote against a protofascist just because he’s a bigoted turdblossom. He has the inalienable right to be such, and your refusal to vote for him just because of that is obviously indecent.
The reason we’re hoping you’re not really any kind of lecturer is that you are frequently incoherent, Mike Smith.
@CaitieCat
Fascism (proto or otherwise) is a subsentially political doctrine. You may reject a fascist qua fascist as fascism entails the treatment of others that transgress reasonable standards of conduct. Namely in the case of fascism the persecution of unpopular minorities.
Religious identity, say Catholicism, is not a comprehensive political doctrine. Catholicism is a wider doctrine than the mere political and as a matter of observable fact Catholics vary widely in their politics. It simply doesn’t follow from a person being a Catholic they are unreasonable. (Where fascists are unreasonable in light of being a fascist)
Regardless of all that, if it is the case that Catholicism (as an example) systematically compelled its adherents to take objectionable political positions, I.e. anti-choice, it is permissible to reject all Catholics in light of the lot of them taking objectionable political position. But in that case you are not rejecting Catholics qua Catholics, you are rejecting Catholics qua their inability to have a reasonable politics. These are very different things. You are being super lazy being using the implied heuristic of Catholic = objectionable politics.
Fortunately, reasonable Catholics exists and a reasonable Catholicism is possible so we don’t need to worry about the extreme case just offered.
Now for my alleged “incoherence:”
1) is wrong for people to refuse to vote for an atheist qua atheist? If it is how is this a different case from the Jewish one?
2) John Rawls. Public Reason. Google it. Read Stanford on this. I’m not taking a controversial position at all. You unbelievable silly person.
Insert “state action” after the fascism entails in the first paragraph in 159
@ #159
No, it is not wrong, even without the qua. It is not wrong to refuse to vote for someone for any reason whatsoever.
@tomh
So it is morally acceptable to refuse to vote for black person or a woman only because they are black or a woman?
That strikes me as textbook racism or sexism. It is morally acceptable to he a racist or sexist?
What a reprehensible position to take.
And in any case you gave shown yourself to be unreasonable person as the standard you propose cannot be accepted by all from a certain position as it would effectively bar any unpopular minority from being able to be elected to any office.
We can have different conceptions. They don’t need to all be right in actual fact, since (obviously) different people’s conceptions can be contradictory.
This doesn’t follow. People are capable of being wrong (or self-contradictory) about many things, including specifically their conception of the good. I’m capable of saying I believe (for whatever particular reason I have that belief, no matter what that may be) those people are wrong about it, and on that basis (again, whatever the fuck it may be) decide they should not be making laws for our community which conform to their mistaken beliefs.
If the mistake traces back to their religion, and they even indicate what sorts of policies they intend to enact/enforce/revoke because of their religious beliefs (or which institutions will be funded or defunded, etc.), then there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to conclude on that basis that they’re wrong and shouldn’t be elected. Doing that isn’t improper in any way, much less is it illegal or unconstitutional. Religion is just like any other random thing in existence which causes people to act a certain way, and I can use that information to act the way I should. Telling me I cannot use it is telling me that my best approach is to be confused or ignorant about the world I live in, or that I should be dishonest with myself or others if anybody starts asking why I made that decision instead of another.
Suppose you tell your voters, or they find out some other way, that you’re an atheist and that you want to be in public office. So, you’re trying to prevent Christian voters from considering whether or not they want to vote for an atheist? Good luck with that. Why shouldn’t they think about that (or anything else for that matter)? How is it supposed to be a problem for the society that it’s able to make an informed decision?
Show where the problem is in saying something like this: “Hmmm, okay, he’s an atheist, so we disagree about certain issues, since I’m not an atheist. I’m going to think about that for a while, check some things about his party/platform/associates/etc., but perhaps it will turn out that my concerns aren’t so relevant/important because he would be the best choice for [insert public office here], despite the fact that I clearly do know and have considered that we’re not in agreement about a number of issues.”
That’s not excluding people. It’s considering a fact that you happen to know, one of many other facts presumably, not something that’s necessarily a decisive test of anything. There’s no need to dictate what people are and are not allowed to simply think about whenever they make a choice. Plus, you don’t have to foolishly pretend as if religion doesn’t determine how some government officials govern. If you thought the world was like that, then in fact it isn’t. And your moral decisions better be about the real world we live in, using good reasoning and not a bunch of spurious bullshit, if you’re going to have reason to expect them to give you the good effects you intended.
Notice that you started up there with something about “liberty of conscience,” so I’d ask how the fuck that’s supposed to be consistent with a rule like “don’t think this kind of thought, because it’s a bad kind of thought.” But I’ll just leave that for you to sort out somehow. Maybe you’re not such a fan of freedom of conscience after all. Maybe you’re not sure what it is you’re complaining about. Maybe you’re not communicating clearly or I’m misreading something. I don’t know.
@Razor
First of all, you are collapsing a huge arear. I didn’t claim that because there are many conceptions of the good
Ignore last post.
@razor
Find where I claim that all conceptions of the good are all correct. I never claimed that. Nothing I said can be twisted to mean that.
However, which conception of the good that us cirrectis highly debatable and I’m of the opinion unprovable to the point that the problem of pluralism is philosophically intractable.
You misunderstanding this renders all your objections moot. You are not in position to reject “incorrect” religious belief as being wrong because the liness of thought that demonstrate the wrongness are not acceptable within a religious framework.
Further as a matter of public import it doesn’t matter why a certain set of policies is being favored. Anti-choice polices do not magically become less objectionable if pursued on secular reasons. I am not denying you relevant information to make public political decision.
And once again the problem is I will not agree to be in a system where people exclude me for my religious views.
And to wrap up this line of thought I am not denying that religious beliefs can (do) determine public policy. But what is objectionable is the policy itself not how any particular politico gets there.
It matters little to me if same sex marriage is banned because religion! Or because people find anal sex gross.
As for your silly question about liberty of conscience, find anywhere in this thread where I have argued that people should be compelled to vote without a religious test by the sword. I have not once said anything approaching that.
Liberty if conscience means that the govt will not force you to behave in ways against your ethical framework along a central range of application. It does not mean that private person have accept your ethical framework or hold your actions as ethical.
Liberty conscience protects your ability to think premarital sex is immoral and not have any without govt interference. It does not shield you from my criticism and judgment that that’s a stupid standard.
I think people should not subject politicos to a religious. I think we should bring soft social pressure against people who do ie speak out against them doing so. I do not think people who vote on immoral grounds should go to jail for both the practical reasons I have said up thread and…dun dun dunnnn…liberty of conscience.
That’s important, primarily for you in the USA, but my main concern as a Brit is: who is more likely to bring about a nuclear war, Clinton or Trump? Anyone who pretends the answer is either “Clinton” or “Impossible to know” has their head so far up their fundament that they can probably look out of their own mouth.
I should also say: Clinton’s choice of Kaine is both ill-judged and cowardly. It doesn’t help her with those she most needs to attract and enthuse – indeed it is, as others have said, a “fuck you” gesture to everyone to her left, or in any way anti-establishment. It shows that she thinks it’s her turn to be President, and all she has to do is avoid as many risks as possible.
KG@167: Not to be self centered, but my main concern in picking a president this year is who is most likely to have me interned and murdered for my ethnic background and political views. It’s not a hard choice, really.
It matters because it affects how policies will be prioritised, how they will be defended, how amenable they are to change. All these are certainly relevant to political decisions and in particular, who to vote for. You are, of course, free to ignore any relevant information you like when making your choice. Others are free to take it into account.
KG@168: I was initially of much the same opinion as you of Kaine. But he’s started to grow on me at least a little. One thing I’ve heard about him that I like is his view on abstinence only education. Namely, the way his views changed. He was initially in favor of AOE on the sort of vague “sex is bad, especially for unmarried teens” grounds and for all I know he still thinks that. But when the studies came out that showed AOE was ineffective in reducing teen sexual activity or pregnancy, he changed his position. A politician who will change their position based on evidence is a good thing. I’d even claim that I’d rather have that trait in a politician than have a politician that agreed with me about everything but was unwilling to change their position if new information became available. Furthermore, Kaine is apparently liked by those who work for him. This is in stark contrast to Trump or Cruz, neither of whom is in the least liked by those who have worked for them. I’m not inspired by the choice of Kaine, but I don’t think it’s as bad as you’re thinking either.
Mike Smith:
I do realize that I don’t know certain things and that I can’t “prove” everything. But no, misunderstanding that wouldn’t render the rest of my comment moot.
“Religious frameworks” aren’t something I need to use to determine whether or not a specific religious belief is wrong. All I have to do is reason appropriately about the relevant issues, using whatever evidence I can get. If the methods and criteria in a religious framework are inadequate, I wouldn’t be in a position to know such things if I were operating with within it. So, no, the emperor doesn’t have clothes, and there’s nothing wrong or invalid about pointing out that fact.
You are in a system like that, whether or not you agree to it. I’m saying people could be more thoughtful about your religious views (or lack thereof). You’re not excluded from anything by virtue of someone having thought about it. They need to do more than merely think about a view to decide to exclude you from office on the basis of it.
No, their methods (or “how they get there”) can be objectionable too. If I don’t think someone is capable of rationally and morally evaluating the reliability of the information and arguments they’re presented, I’m not going to think they’re fit for the job. Not on that specific policy which they happen to be wrong about, and not on other unrelated policies which they haven’t begun to consider yet. If they’re not going to be open and transparent about how they’re getting this information (directly from Jesus, they might say), in a way that I and anyone else in the voting public can understand and scrutinize no matter what our religious views may be, because actually their process is just layers and layers of bullshit, then I’m not going to consider them fit for the job. I don’t think a democratic system can function when officials (or voters) are lying, distorting, manipulating, dissembling, and otherwise bullshitting their way to the point they want to make. And I don’t want our system to be dysfunctional. So, if this hypothetical candidate does occasionally come to a fairly decent conclusion using their broken methods, I’m still not going to be satisfied that I don’t have (and shouldn’t consider if I did, according to you) a better candidate who wouldn’t undermine the process in that way.
@KG
Both how issues are priorized and amendable to change are embedded public actions and public statements of a politico. I can tell for example that a person is massively against abortion and favors anti choice policies by virtue of their voting record. Indeed, voting records are a more reliable indicator than religious identity. Case in point: Biden is a Catholic and abortion makes him queasy. He still has a better pro choice record than any non catholic republican I can think of (through I think an example may exist).
A person standing for election who says “I will do everything in my power to end the scourge of abortion because God commands us to protect the innocent” is not anymore objectionable than a person who says “I will end the scourge of abortion by any means necessary because lying sluts have been oppressing men and should be punished.”
Religious identity is a lazy and inaccurate heuristic. Anyway that religious beliefs motivate public policy can be checked for in ways that are both more accurate and morally relevant.
I guess as an academic exercise you can worry about how religious belief us influences Kaine’s politics. I rather just worry about his politics. My opinion of Kaine being safe middle of choice is unaffected by having Professor Myers throw his Catholicism in my face.
Now defending policies is a slightly case as politicos routinely make arguments on explicitly religious grounds (and for the sake of this argument I’m counting humanism as a religion). It is harder to ignore and may more directly effect the policy discussion (if not the outcome). Now I hold two lines here: as a matter of charity and reasonableness I should try my best reconstruct the argument on now religious grounds–it’s perfectly possible for religious arguments to support defensible public policy and be translated in statements acceptable to all. Case in point: many progressive Christians defend the welfare state on explicit religious grounds. If I find the policy can only be defended from within a certain religious framework then and only then may I reject it out of hand. Even then the problem is not the religious nature of the defense but the inability for the policy to be translated into public reasons not acceptable to all. This problem can also occur in nonreligious doctrines ie Kantianism and lying.
Second we should encourage the norm through soft pressure if living nonpublic reason out if politics.
If religious identity and arguments were a valid basis for rejecting political action, then the civil rights movement should be rejected out of hand as the civil rights movement was largely pursued by deeply religious actors forwarding deeply religious arguments.
If it is proper to reject Christians qua Christians then one should judge Martin Luther King Jr a bloody tyrant that imposed his religious beliefs on the rest of us via Civil Rights Act of 1964.
@razor
Yes your inability to recognize a reasonable pluralism is a major stumbling block. Its not merely that you can’t prove anything its that these problems are practically intractable. There will always be religious believers.
So aging this renders you argument moot. Take your second point that you have access to a demonstration that a religious view us wrong because you can reason acceptably with relevant information and evidence. The thing is what is acceptable, relevant and evidence is not given. Reasonable people may reasonably disagree on what counts. So no you don’t really have anything that can be agreed to by all and thus is part of you worldview not public reason.
Second the degree to which that our system has people subjected to religious test in the public sphere us the degree to which it us illegitimate. It is wrong. By religious test I mean a refusal to Vite for religion x because of and only of religious x. That is what I am rejecting. If you are to argue that people can think about various religious positions the umm yes? I don’t see the relevance. I am stipulating that the attudues I’m rejecting are strong enough to prevent a religious minorities from holding office not mere thought about them.
As for how they get there being contention I think we are talking past each other. There are of course policy positions that determine other policies positions. To wit “I should listen to scientists about science” is both a policy and a method but there comes a point where reasonable set of methods(the ur-policy) can be agreed to by all from a certain position. Once some gets to the ur-policy I don’t care how they get there. I if course think people to act reasonably at all times and that naturally has a weak constraint on acceptable methods. You don’t have to care about unreasonable persons or doctrines.
Please just read up on Rawls.
In 173 living nonpublic should read leaving nonpublic.
Alright then. Some combination of incoherent writing, false assumptions and apparently nonexistent proofreading does that for yours.
@Razor.
I’m on a phone. Excuse me for typos. I’m also dyslexic so I don’t always catch them. Now buggar off.
You are claiming your are in a position, as a voter, to judge a religious belief as false because of relevant acceptable lines of evidence. Is that correct?
I’m saying that what makes something relevant, acceptable, or evidence is highly debatable. It is not a given, it is not fact that, say, science has anything at all to say on theology. As such any demonstration of a religious belief being false can be rejected be reasonable person as all such demonstrations are highly embedded within a competing doctrine.
To use an example from my own comprehensive doctrine, I don’t think science says anything fundamentally interesting about existence and by far and large it’s the wrong “tool” to use for all of the fundamentally important issues of existence.
Rawls public reason. Google. I’m taking a highly well regarded line.
If I am allowed to vote for any reasons whatsoever and be moral, then my best bet is too vote for Trump.
I’m a white dude who can pass as “straight.” As such having public policies against racism and sexism hurt me by removing systematic privilege I enjoy over people of color and women. I mean its my vote right? Who are you to judge if I vote to further my self-interest to make sure white dudes stay in charge. My vote. My choice right?
I can deal with a few typos, but people don’t typo their way into writing nonsense and making false assumptions. On the other hand, if you really don’t care enough to do a little simple proofreading, so you think I should bugger off and let you scribble this crap to yourself, then I don’t see why I should care enough to read any more.
Then let those reasonable people reject, since I’m not saying they can’t. If there’s a legitimate debate to be had, then bring it the fuck on. Maybe I’d even change my mind. In the meantime, while you’re sorting out exactly what the fuck I’m supposed to do about that, I do still need to believe some things are true of the world while others are false, whatever those may be. Highly debatable or not, it is reasonable for me to make conclusions about religious beliefs being false. There is more than sufficient reason for that, and it does make sense within the framework of these “competing doctrines” which I have and certain other people don’t. If that’s actually your standard for making your counterargument (that there exist people who have reasons), then you have no real objection. That is, unless you’re actually claiming the situation is different for me, that it isn’t true that I’m a person who has reason to conclude that a belief is false (a religious belief or any belief). Is that actually what you’re saying? Why is it that they get to be cast as “reasonable” whenever they make conclusions, but it’s assumed that I’m not? Are you saying religious people don’t conclude things, and I shouldn’t either? Whatever it is, what am I supposed to do about it?
Considering there is no other tool to use, you are as full of shit with this as you are the one’s vote isn’t private, as in a secret ballot.
@razor
You are allowed to judge any belief you want as false; I have not rejected that. You not allow to dictate to others via voting that such a belief is false.
You can hold to Catholicism to be false, you are not allowed to make law (vote, public policy) from that judgment. As it is unreasonable to expect Catholics to abandeon thuer faith. (In the inverse is true as well, Catholics are not allowed to Vite from Catholicism.)
@nerd
You fuckweasel nincompoop. You dumb ditch. You unbelievablely moronic ignorant fool.
We have been over this. You are using private in a sense that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. You are too stupid to understand this if course but no matter.
I again point out that the outside of my house is PRIVATE property despite it being visibly to all. Or to use an even more pitched example the cubs cap I’m currently wearing is my PRIVATE property despite it having a team logo that is well known.
No silence people who actually know what they are talking about are trying to have a conversation. You blinkered bimboisque baseless waste if space, you terryfing twee twit.
Mike, please take the time to proofread your posts. I don’t have a position on this matter at the moment, but your posts are borderline unreadable with the amount of typos you’re making, and that doesn’t really help you when you’re making a philosophical argument plenty of people haven’t encountered before.
I wasn’t proposing a law which (implicitly or explicitly) claims Catholic beliefs are false. I’m saying that a person’s beliefs certainly can and do matter to me when I vote, whatever kind of belief it is or whatever it is about. And I’m saying I’m not “irrational,” as you claimed, when I take such things into account. After all, to reiterate, why shouldn’t I do so, since that can affect how they will behave? I want to know what is likely to happen when I make some moral decision or another, so I’d better be able to use whatever information I can gather to make the best decision I can.
Besides, it’s just as unreasonable to expect me to abandon whatever beliefs I have, which you may or may not share, whenever I go into a voting booth. I don’t no idea what horrible effects you think it’s supposed to have on Catholics, when they’re confronted with the fact that I voted differently than they did because I think they’re wrong about some shit. Sounds truly awful, but I think they can grow up and get over it. My existence as an atheist does not infringe anyone’s rights; neither does being someone who tries to be reasonable and tries to act on my beliefs by participating in a representative democracy, as I have every right to do.
Sorry, that’s what a simple typo looks like. I meant that I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.
Everyone go here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/public-reason/
and
here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/764257?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
and
here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/ (especially 3.2-3.5 and 4.3)
Those are basically where I am getting my position from. Basically, all positions of political authority have to be actually open to all on an equal basis. Voters, if en mass refuse to vote for a religious identity X only because of adherents having that religious identity X, can effectively block positions of authority from that religious identity X. Thus, for positions of authority to actually be open to all, voters should be discouraged from voting from a private religious test.
@nerd
I’m not quite done kicking you around yet as what you are saying is so gobsmacking stupid that I have a hard time believing an functioning adult is saying it. Get someone to read the below slowly until it sinks into that thicker impenetrable head of yours.
here: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/private and here: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/public
From the second link you will see this definition of public:
(let’s call this sense A)
“a : of, relating to, or affecting all the people or the whole area of a nation or state
b : of or relating to a government
c : of, relating to, or being in the service of the community or nation”
I said voting, for VEEP given the context, (going to the poll, checking the box and casting the ballot) is a public act because how your (or mine) vote affects everyone. It is a public act, not a private one. And lo, you denser than
Osmium ass that is the very definition that is commonly accepted for a sense of the word ‘public.’ I nave claimed that voting was a public act in this following sense:
(sense B)
“a : exposed to general view : open
b : well-known, prominent
c : perceptible, material”
because obviously it isn’t as it is not done in front of people. Now I, in my infinite patience, thought you were rejecting that that voting was public in sense A and proceeding to argue alone those lines. This is why I said you rejecting the public nature of voting was weird; there is nothing that concerns the business of the state more than voting in a democracy. It never occurred to me that a person could be so grossly incompetent as to hold that because voting is private in sense B it is also private in sense A. Or somehow sense B is the primary sense used in these conversations (It isn’t by the way you putz). If you knew your ass from your elbow you should have been able to figure out that we talking past each other one by which sense of public we meant. (check the link ‘private’ has the same two sense as well). I have now thrice (this time with links!) pointed out that we have been using a different private vs public distinction. Your persistence in using sense B to attack my position while I am using sense A to take my position is both a straw man and transparent equivocation because you are interlocutor who is either too stupid to know when you must grant a point because you have been reduced to an absurdity or incapable of acting in good faith with me.
In either case, you are a complete waste of bandwidth and waste of my time. Good day to you Mx! Do not bother to respond unless you are able to acknowledge that public/private have two distinct senses.
Try to follow this Mike. When presented with a candidate whose religious proposals are unjustifiable and unacceptable for a secular public, you’re telling us we shouldn’t think about that. Or we shouldn’t let that guide our decision-making. It would be wrong because (if I can sort through your mess of an argument) some or all of the people in that same candidate’s religious denomination won’t agree with the reasons others like me find it unjustifiable or unacceptable. They do think it is justifiable and acceptable, so the rest of us should somehow ensure our brains are not working normally in such situations. Does that make any fucking sense to you?
Whatever you say. Your vote, your reasons. End of story asshole.
Quit telling us what criteria we should use. You don’t have that authority, moral or legal to do so. All you have is your inane irrational unreasoning.
Asshat, the act of voting is a matter of public record. For example, the political parties can see I voted in the Democratic primary. They can’t see who I voted for or why. Which is why you are being totally stupid. Who and why are totally private.
You are trying to pretend I must let people know who I voted for and why, and be able to DEFEND IT TO YOU. You are utterly and totally irrelevant to my private decisions, and sooner you understand that, the sooner you learn why your criteria is bullshit.
@razor
I feel we are going around in a circle.
Take this for example:
“I wasn’t proposing a law which (implicitly or explicitly) claims Catholic beliefs are false.”
I have been arguing against voters subjecting politicos to a religious test. What I mean by a religious test is voters refusing to vote for a person from a religion (x) only because they are of that religion (x) regardless of any other factor (universal agreement on everything else). If you hold that it is proper for voters to vote using a religious test you are proposing a law that implicitly punishes Catholics because you think the are wrong. Catholics would never agree to such a law and as such it is not a proper basis to cast your vote on. (The reverse is true as well, Catholics who won’t vote for an atheist qua atheist are not voting from a proper basis as atheists could not agree with that criteria.)
“I’m saying that a person’s beliefs certainly can and do matter to me when I vote, whatever kind of belief it is or whatever it is about. And I’m saying I’m not “irrational,” as you claimed, when I take such things into account.”
Beliefs that a purely private, such as the ontological status of God or the proper form of the good life, are largely irrelevant to practical political decision making–I think our duties towards others that can be enforced by the state is a rather narrow set of duties. There is a wide range of Catholic views on various issues, many of which are not at all unreasonable political positions to take. As such religious identity is poor basis to make a decision. It is wrong to reduce anyone down to a mere label. If you weaponize religious identity (including atheism) in this way you are acting against your own interests. It is irrational to do so because right now atheists are practically barred from holding public office because of Christians subjecting politicos to the no atheist allowed test. If you hold it is proper (permissible) for an atheist to reject a Christian qua Christian you must also hold it is proper for a Christian to reject an atheist qua atheist. It is irrational because it authorizes needless aggression and damage to your own interests, both in the here and now and in other possible worlds.
“since that can affect how they will behave?”
You have many touch points for judging behavior besides religious identity. Many of them are better than judging by religious identity. The degree to which religious identity motivates behavior comes out anyway in that behavior. I need to know how likely a politico is to behaves anti-choice I don’t need to know why that behavior occurs. I still don’t see the great relevance of religious identity.
“Besides, it’s just as unreasonable to expect me to abandon whatever beliefs I have, which you may or may not share, whenever I go into a voting booth.”
That is not what I am saying. I am saying the following:
1) do not subject politicos to a religious test. Be willing to vote for a Catholic (Jews, Moron, etc) if they align with reasonable politics.
2) whatever basis you have selected each candidate on must either A) be based on reasons that in theory are acceptable to all from a certain position (aka public reason) OR the decision is based on your own beliefs in such a way a reasonable third party can translate them into public reason.
I expect the same of Catholics, Mormons, Kantians, Jews, Hobbesians, Lockeans Libertarians, etc.
“I don’t [have any] idea what horrible effects you think it’s supposed to have on Catholics”
The same negative effects that atheists are facing in this reality already–having our interesting systematically ignored, having widespread fear and distrust for atheists, being unable to have a substantial impute into the laws that govern us, lacking the necessary basis for social self-respect etc. History is littered with examples of a majority using the organ of the state to oppress the minority. Now it just so happens that Catholics are not (now) an unpopular minority; but they once were and given the political climate they might go back to that. But the principle of allowing a religious test is corrosive and gross. It’s wrong when conservatives try to portray Obama as unfit for office for being a Muslim (apart from Obama not being a Muslim).
“My existence as an atheist does not infringe anyone’s rights”
Of course not. I have never said anything that implies that. What is wrong is if you use your atheism to form the basis of law that excludes religious believers. A reasonable tries to give reasons for their political actions that are acceptable to all from a certain position. It is unreasonable for atheist to say “I’m never going to for a Catholic no matter what, because I think Catholicism is wrong!” Such a standard is unacceptable to Catholics and others and thus can not be the basis of Law and Lawlike actions.
I really want to know what the thread thinks of an political actor like Martin Luther King Jr, He forwarded the religious right movement on explicitly religious grounds, using explicitly religious arguments. If religious identity is so repugnant that it forms a proper basis to reject a politico regardless of anything else, I shudder to think what low opinion of King people have to have.
@Razor
“When presented with a candidate whose religious proposals are unjustifiable and unacceptable for a secular public, you’re telling us we shouldn’t think about that.”
No. I have never said that. Of have been talking about rejecting persons not policies.
If a person proposes policies that are not justifiable from a public reason standpoint because their religious (or other) content you may reject the politico on those grounds. The politico is proposing unreasonable policies. You are not rejecting them out of their religious identity but from their inability to be reasonable. And there is a hell of a lot of distance between “This candidate identifies as religion X” to “This candidate is proposing unreasonable polices due to religion X” and further distance to “All politico from religion X will always enact unreasonable policy y.”
The politico and people who share his underlying doctrine may agree to it but reasonable others do not. That is why the policy is unreasonable.
I guess I do have a question about that part. Me and, if I recall correctly, EnlightenmentLiberal, hold the belief that membership in the Catholic church is to some minor degree immoral because their membership and tithing supports a sociopolitical entity that does tangible harm. On those basis, would it be immoral to not vote for a Catholic qua Catholic?
I would refuse to vote for someone that gives money and support to, for example, the American Family Association, and I don’t think that’s a particularly objectionable view. That wouldn’t sit well with the American Family Association, but does that make it immoral for me to refuse to vote for an AFA member qua AFA member?
Asshole, what makes you think we don’t already do that? What makes you think we will vote for nothing other than atheists? The answer is you not thinking.
NOBODY HAS TO JUSTIFY THEIR VOTE TO ANY THIRD PARTY. Suggesting that anybody has to do that it is immoral, unethical, illegal, and patently stupid and obnoxious.
Quit while you are behind.
Mike Smith, in case you haven’t been paying attention, it is the rethugs who have informal *snicker* religious tests for candidacy and who to vote for. All legal, ethical, and moral. Why aren’t YOU bothering them, instead of us?
Mike Smith
The Priests at Church used to tell us stuff like thus.
@nerd
Can you read? I’m serious. Because you unmitigated jackass you are completely equivocating on what the word private means and what the word public means in this context. You are stupidly and lazily conflating two very different senses. You realize that elections have consequences right? that you don’t just vote and nothing happens? that if you vote for candidate X and candidate X proceeds to destroy my life you action helped that process along right? WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING WHEN YOU ARE VOTING? You do not have the right to vote in ways that abridge my rights you jackass as the clearest example of why your vote concerns me. Jesus fucking Christ you unbelievably stupid git.
take this:
“You are trying to pretend I must let people know who I voted for and why, and be able to DEFEND IT TO YOU.”
I am not pretending that you must let people know who you voted for; my knowledge of your being one of the voters that wrecked my life is irrelevant to voters wrecking my life. I am correctly saying your vote affects the public and as such it is a public act. NOBODY BESIDES YOU MAY EVER KNOW WHO YOU VOTED FOR AND IT IS STILL A PUBLIC ACT. Why? because it concerns the public and it is the business of the state. you have lazily (or stupidly or both) conflated “the public knows” with “It concerns the public.” That’s two different things, two different meanings.
What happens in the top secret parts of the DOD concerns the public (it is public in the sense I am using) despite that the most people do not know (it is not public in your sense). I have now explained to 4 fucking times. either you can’t read or you are too fucking stupid to know the difference.
When business can dumps toxic sludge into a common river that is a public action (it concerns the public) EVEN IF THE COMPANY IS NEVER CAUGHT DOING IT.
As for the underlying point, voting is the means be which law gets decided. If I am expected to obey a law, it damn well be able to be defended by someone to me (me from a certain position). Look mcfuckster over the last 10ish years 35+ state passed same-sex bans, including one I worked really, really hard to prevent happening. Every single time one of those laws passed it really hurt me. I mean this both in the sense that it hurt my interests and the literally sense that every time one of those things passed it felt like a knife was stabbed into my heart and twisted. The people who voted in favor (or against for that matter) of the same sex marriage bans were not making a private decision, a decision like what they will have for dinner on any given night, but they were deciding what would happen to my status as a equal citizen under the law. So yes those people who rejected my humanity and used the organs of the state to make me to a second class citizen status for at least 8 years better damn well have a fucking argument that I deserved to be treated lesser than them, and that argument better damn well be one I could accept for their action. And them insisting that oh their vote was a mere private decision, akin to what baseball team they should root for, because they cast their ballot in secret doesn’t get them off the fucking hook you disgusting moronic dipshit.
Me being concerned that who you are voting for is NOT the same thing as me being concerned (or not as the case will be) with what you are having for dinner. What you eat is your business. Who you want to have power over my life IS my business fucknut.
Now whether or not you want to justify your vote to me personally, I do not care. I am not saying that. I am saying you need to be able to justify your actions to all persons in theory. If you don’t want to bother with me directly, whatever. That is not relevant to what I am saying and doesn’t really undermine the case I am sketching.
This of course renders this:
“Quit telling us what criteria we should use. You don’t have that authority, moral or legal to do so.”
whining pointless. If my argument is wrong, my argument is wrong. Show it. It doesn’t matter if I am saying it, what matters is the underlying argument. everybody judges people behavior all the time. I distinctly remember being called asshole a lot on this site.
@Nerd
“Asshole, what makes you think we don’t already do that?”
Because upthread you point blank you refuse to do so? you did in fact say you won’t sign a overt Christian onto the ballot in light of them being a Christian. I have been arguing the entire time against a religious test and that is what a religious test means.
“NOBODY HAS TO JUSTIFY THEIR VOTE TO ANY THIRD PARTY.”
Horseshit. If voters vote to have me killed for being queer, as the voters in Uganda have done recently, they DAMN WELL better be able to defend having me killed. You see it is a of supreme importance to me to stay alive. Voters are not allowed to damage my life (or end it) without getting me on board for the reason that I should die.
Not all state actions are justifiable, as such not all votes in a democracy are justifiable. We damn well better encourage voters to judge what sorts of votes are justifiable. We wouldn’t want to end up with Trump as president now.
“in case you haven’t been paying attention, it is the rethugs who have informal *snicker* religious tests for candidacy and who to vote for. ”
Yes I know. I have only been using this as an example throughout this thread.
“Why aren’t YOU bothering them, instead of us?”
I’m having this exact conversation in reverse right now with my father and brother…so I am.
Mike Smith,
I don’t get it:
1) Constitution says (paraphrased) “We the people ARE the government”
2) Constitution says “no religious test can be used by the government, as qualification for office”.
therefore
::) to use a candidate’s religion as a deciding factor on whether or not to vote for one, violates the Constitution
…
I thought the Constitution defined the structure of the governing body and the laws allowably made, did not apply to individual actions directly.
–
Even accepting that chain of “logic”; how would one enforce it?
Verify that a person’s opinion of a candidate does not use the candidates religion attitudes to influence the voter’s vote?
Just remove all mention of a candidate’s religion from publicly accessible biographies of candidates?
Even with ideal capability, I doubt it would be acceptable.
As I understood it: the whole point of voting was to act as a “blending” of public opinion. Not to provide the ideal solution. only, acceptable to most.
—
If you don’t want to let someone’s religion prejudice your vote about one, fine.
The problem is trying to enforce that rule on the entire public.
Mike Smith:
there is a huge fucking difference between a vote to kill and a vote preventing a person from gaining an office.
FALSE dichotomy from you.
@vivec
I’m going to have to think for a bit about that dynamic of being a member of the Roman Catholic Church as opposed to any of the the other denominations that can be considered Catholic (like Anglicanism, Orthodox). It’s a tougher case. My gut still says no.
AFA case is a lot easier to deal with because the AFA is not an all encompassing group. It’s specifically a political lobbying group and as such it should be bound by public reason. That they follow polices unsupportable by public reason is enough to not vote for AFA member in light of that. AFA is not an all encompassing doctrine; it acts on a narrower range of policies and answers.
Let’s not strawman Mike’s position. I think he’s made it pretty clear that he’s not saying people have to declare their reasons for voting openly, he’s just making an argument that voting solely along religious lines is immoral.
Assuming he’s correct – which I don’t actually think – it’s entirely possible to say that “Voting along religious lines is immoral” while still respecting that voting is a private act that people don’t have to disclose their reasons for.
Mike’s saying your reasoning should be hypothetically defensible, not that you actually have to disclose your reasoning.
The Roman Catholic Church does have political power, and does actively influence policy the same way a purely political group like the AFA does.
If I had to pick between, hypothetically, a candidate that is a tithed member of the RCC and a candidate that isn’t, surely “I don’t want to vote for someone that gives money to a entity that pursues political ends I consider morally abhorrent” is a defensible justification to vote for the latter?
Er, assuming that the two candidates are otherwise politically identical.
@slithey tove
There is a huge difference between a vote for a politico and a direct vote. But I am not trying to say they are the only two choices, so not a false dichotomy.I am not even saying that they are opposed to each other. I am saying they are both public acts because they, clearly, effect the public. My point is about their similarities not they large difference in degree between them. (And the Uganda kill the Gay bill wasn’t voted on directly, it just got passed by a group of people promising to pass it.)
As for the enforcement issue, read the thread. I’ve been asked about this a few times. My answer is what i am doing. I.E. speaking out against de facto religious tests and discussing why they are such bad ideas.
Yeah, sure hey, as we said in the YooPee when I lived there.
Who is more likely to vote solely along religious lines. Atheists, or rethugs? Given the low number number of avowed atheists running for public office, the rethugs.
So, why is Mike Smith annoying atheists, and not the rethugs? Like the imaginary deity, MS appears to have bad aim….
Why the fuck are you at an atheists web site, annoying us with your idiocy, rather than at a rethug site where religion of everybody is fair game for discrimination?
You missed your target group….
His original quibble was over PZ highlighting Kaine’s catholicisim, which he believes was making an argument that his catholicism, in and of itself, is a reason not to support Kaine.
I happen to think it is at least a factor, so don’t take this as my argument. But under Mike’s reasoning, that would be a valid reason to object.
Nerd, you really do come off needlessly aggressive a lot of the time. Disagree or not, Mike’s statements are founded in philosophical theory, though not without criticism. You have been kind of uncharitable in your reading of his posts too.
Nerd @206:
Why the fuck don’t you stop trying to speak for everyone? That is annoying. I don’t find Mike’s comments annoying or idiotic.
re 204:
crap. got me. I misused the phrase,”false dichotomy”. my bad.
Intended to say “False Similarity”: comparing voting for death to queers as similar to voting against someone for his religious beliefs. AKA “false comparison”.
The first sentence I used was fully intended. Those two types of political actions cannot be compared, as completely different; even if they’re abstracted to the concept of “political act”.
Is there anybody, anybody at all in the whole wide world, who has a motivation to do that? Are there lots of these people? I suspect most such people don’t have “universal agreement on everything else” when they’ll tell you that a candidates religion is some kind of a problem for them. I’d like you to imagine a somewhat more realistic person who is making a mistake that you’re worried about. Otherwise, I don’t think I’m going to get whatever your point is supposed to be.
Why are you talking about punishment? If somebody doesn’t have public reason (which we were both taking for granted as an appropriate stance to take) for their Catholic-oriented policies (making abortion illegal, for instance), then I’m not giving them the job. And if you ask me why, that’s going to be part of the reason I tell you that I’m not giving them the job, because I intend to be honest in my response and not self-serving or paranoid about what might happen to some hypothetical atheist candidate. They can get some other job, and it is not their right to impose themselves on the public if they refuse to serve the whole public in a justifiable, acceptable, secular way. Because this is a job that they’re applying for, not a reward or a punishment.
If I think they’re wrong, it’s not proper. Why? What’s improper about that?
If I had the choice to either vote for someone who is right or someone who is wrong about X, what other criteria am I supposed to use, since you’re claiming that one is improper? Or if one candidates general approach to forming conclusions or solving problems (whether or not the conclusion is wrong) is more flawed than their competitor’s, why is it improper or unfair or some other bad thing, to cast my vote for the one who seems to have less flaws (given, obviously, whatever else in my entire worldview which I take to be true/beneficial/etc.)?
This is why I’m saying I’d obviously have to get some understanding of what the person wants to do, based on their platform and past record, which parties/institutions/corporations/etc. they’re affiliated with, and so forth. If they’re Catholic and not anti-choice, not sexist in any other way, not homophobic, transphobic, racist, classist, etc., then I’m not going to have much of a reason to vote against this Catholic, am I? I voted for Joe Biden, for example, who isn’t perfect of course, but it’s not as if I didn’t know he’s Catholic or somehow removed that thought from my mind when I considered what might when I vote for or against him. My own family is Catholic (most of them), and besides that, you don’t have to remind me that there is diversity of thought in an absolutely enormous group of people (which applies just as well to other religions) who live all sorts of different lives all over the planet. You can keep accusing me of making all sorts of other mistakes like this if you want. But now it seems like you’re not making the same objection as you were when this conversation started. It sounds like we’ve cleared up some of that, so there’s less apparent distance between our positions than there used to be.
sorry, candidate’s, not candidates. and “what might happen when I vote”
Jebus, the stupidity of some the folks like MS that infest this blog.
I’ve voted in every election since ’72. Let me show you the fingers and thumb on my left hand. It counts up to five total. Now, let me subtract any avowed atheists (some may have been closet atheists, and therefore irrelevant to my point) from that total. Still five.
So in every election (22 state/national plus local elections to date), which every ballot position was filled, I’ve had to essentially follow the points made my MS. My problem is that MS doesn’t understand the difference between personal preferences, those compromises that must be made to vote for candidate, and that my vote is supposed to be secret, and not subject to criticism by second/third parties. He seems to feel I must justify my vote to third parties. NOPE.
So, keep asking why MS is bothering atheists rather than the rethugs/descendents of the Moral Majority™. I’ll be back in a couple of days to check on the answers.
He’s said repeatedly that he doesn’t think that at all, just that it should by hypothetically justifiable.
Hypothetical bullshit, considered bullshit. NOBODY should have to justify their vote in any way. Otherwise, the secret ballot means nothing.
Reality is the finally judge, not hypotheticals.
Rob Grigjanis #209
re Mike Smith
Did you read this thread?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/07/01/now-theres-an-idea/
You’re not understanding the concept if you think hypothetical justification means making the ballots not-secret.
It’s a relatively uncontroversial claim that there are immoral reasons to vote a certain way. All Mike is claiming is that not voting for a catholic simply because he’s a catholic is an immoral act. I disagree with him, but that’s not a ridiculous claim in and of itself.
Case in point – I think not voting for a catholic just for being a catholic is hypothetically justifiable, inasmuch as I think it’s not immoral to avoid voting for someone who gives monetary and vocal support to a group that promotes morally reprehensible actions.
That I can hypothetically justify my vote doesn’t make it somehow not secret.
Saying that “it’s immoral to vote/not vote for reason x” is not a demand that people disclose how they vote.
If the word “justify” is your sticking point, then just skip that part of the argument. It’s ultimately a trivial point to focus on.
It just means that he’s arguing that not voting for a member of a specific religion just for belonging to that religion is immoral and that
A. PZ was in the wrong for highlighting Kaine’s catholicism as a negative reason to give political support and
B. We should encourage people not to vote along religious lines by condemning the act of doing such as morally negative.
That’s not an invalid argument, though I disagree that it is always wrong to vote along religious lines, given that some religions are political entities. It’s kind of silly to focus on the word “justify” rather than actually attacking the meat of his argument.
chigau @216: No, I don’t read most threads.
Mike Smith@173
Has it occurred to you that some candidates do not have a voting record?
I assume the “not” in the middle sentence is an error. Where have I said that consideration of a candidates not-explicitly-political views should only cover their religious views? If a candidate believes the moon landings were faked, or that aliens are kidnapping and anally probing people, or that 9-11 was planned by the CIA, that’s most certainly going to influence my view of whether they are fit for public office – and if it doesn’t influence yours, you’re a fool.
This is so far from what I have said (or as far as I’ve read, what anyone else has said – I admit I haven’t read every comment), it’s hard to believe you are both arguing in good faith, and capable of reading for comprehension. I most certainly have not said that political action should be rejected because it is based on religious identity and arguments. I challenge you to quote anything I have said that could reasonably be interpreted in that way. It is nonetheless perfectly valid to take into account a person’s religious convictions when deciding whether to vote for them, or for that matter whether to work with them even on issues where one is in agreement with them, because such convictions provide information both about how they are likely to decide on issues of public policy, and about how (ir)rational they are.