I think it’s not necessarily a contradiction to hold your pro-choice and anti-death penalty stance, but it’s still a contradiction to hold the pro-life and pro-death penalty stance if your reasoning behind the pro-life stance is that all life is sacred.

I agree that a person’s body autonomy and the state’s power to execute citizens should not overlap, but I still think that giving the “all life is sacred” line to justify pro-life and then being pro-death penalty “because some people deserve to die” amounts to hypocrisy.

It’s the natural conclusion of the strategy republicans set into motion to manipulate their base.

It started just after Watergate. Nixon was facing massive calls for justice from both sides. Republican think tanks realized that their base of conservatives consumed news from all sources that informed their mostly unbiased decision to hold their guy accountable. So those republican think tanks devised a plan to create a conservative news outlet that explicitly demonized other news so that the conservative base would never turn on one of their own again. That strategy was realized in the 90’s with the creation of Fox News.

Since then, conservative media has been slowly transforming politics from the perspective of the average conservative into a team sport, where the main motivation isn’t “who runs the country better” but rather “my team is better than yours”.

It wasn’t so pervasive 20 years ago, but conservative media has found themselves with a base that now only responds to the outrage they’ve been conditioning them with, and that has created the raging confrontational assholes you see today.

Being a conservative doesn’t mean what it used to. And that’s because the Republican leadership robbed conservatives of that in order to maintain control of their base.

My mind is blown. This is very well written. Thank you

Our conservatives aren’t like conservatives elsewhere in the world. Our liberals are like your conservatives, policy wise.

Our conservatives are brainwashed by four decades of targeted conservative media that’s explicitly designed to keep them in an anger loop in order to create a political climate where republicans (who are the actual politicians) don’t have to appeal to the conservative base with actual policy.

Republicans, through channels like Fox News and OANN (seriously, go watch some of it and see what we’re dealing with here) have demonized everyone to the left of them so hard that entire generations of conservatives genuinely believe that there’s a bloody revolution coming.

It would be nice if it were actually bullshit, but these lunatics who make up half of our voting population put a con-man entertainer with zero political experience in the whitehouse for four years and installed conservative justices to our highest court who are systematically dismantling our democracy.

It’s very real. It’s so real that some of the less insane conservatives are waking up to how dangerous the details of this plan actually are, and that’s why Republicans are panicking about this.

That’s what makes this extra stupid. Maga hats don’t think that far

This is kind of obvious and I probably don’t have to say it but…

Trump is doing this to weasel his way out of a debate he shouldn’t have agreed to. No way in hell Trump subjects himself to the same drug test. He’s betting on Biden not agreeing to it either so he can just say “well those liberals are obviously playing dirty so I’m out”

The drugs in question are necessarily irrelevant

Any response other than “I already have” or “I donate resources” paints you as an armchair hypocrite who doesn’t have the credentials to understand, let alone have an opinion about this conflict.

You my friend, are the one who is adorable.

World War is not the solution you think it is

Touché

You can die of cirrhosis from drinking too much for too long, but it’s still culturally held as a stress reliever. You can die from diabetes if you eat too much sugar for too long, but it’s still sold to children as edible happiness. Hell, you can die slowly and painfully from taking too much Tylenol, but it’s still the world’s most popular painkiller by far.

Too much of anything kills eventually. That doesn’t bare any significance to whether or not it’s good for stress in some amount.

Won’t somebody think of the poor destitute ISPs?

Problem is that requires good faith from both sides. If only one side adheres to that then the other side uses it as ammunition and inputs their politically appointed judges anyway.

Case in point, Senator Mitch McConnell crying out in 2015 about Obama wanting to appoint someone at the end of his term, saying that he would be robbing the next president of that legacy and it would be a political appointment. And then Mitch McConnell said nothing as they appointed and Trump approved three blatantly political nominees.

Both sides have to agree that those positions be apolitical or one side just ends up getting screwed. And of course we are not going to see that because Republicans don’t have a shred of decency left and the whole party.

Dude, thanks for posting this.

There is at least an entire sub dedicated to hating on pit bulls. I think multiple subs. During its time a few years ago, one specific sub could make it to the top of r/all with 10,000+ upvotes.

Reddit really doesn’t like pit bulls.

In Louisiana, we have a super majority republican congress, bought republican judges, and a republican governor for the first time in 8 years. We are in a phase of revenge passing whatever right wing bills they can get away with because we no longer have a Democrat governor to turn away the ridiculous crap.

Our legislature absolutely will write in Christianity as the “correct” religion, and our governor is in the process of rewriting our constitution for a few reasons, one of which could very well be naming Christianity.

It’s going to take more than a challenge from tst to fix this one… We are deteriorating faster than Texas because Republicans are passing bills out of spite.

Had me in the first half

Bernie doesn’t do a ton of grandstanding. He’s also one of the only senators who introduces bills that get bipartisan support sometimes. I really don’t think he’s introducing a bill he means to go nowhere

most of the time for no reason at all

Not for no reason. It’s a form of control. If you genuinely believe that the opposing party is going to bring the country to ruin, you’re a lot less likely to consider their position in politics.

Look at the affordable care act. Conservatives hated/hate it because “obamacare” was portrayed as giving free health care to the lazy poor that you have to pay for as a hard working conservative. When asked if we should repeal Obamacare, conservatives poll something crazy like 95% yes, simply because it’s a bad word they learned.

Many of those conservatives have health care through the ACA and get mad when Republicans take it away because they need it. Those same conservatives mostly aren’t even aware that what they have is literally obamacare.

It’s control all the way down.

Politics is fundamentally different for conservatives. They have to have someone to hate. It’s drilled into them by their media outlets.

The tactic is a form of fear based control that conservative media has been working on since Nixon, and made into effect with the birth of Fox News in 1996.

Seriously. Nixon’s think tank conceived the conservative media outlet as a catch-all, exclusive source of news that as a primary function would steer conservatives to not trust other news sources.

They did this because they did not want another Watergate, where conservatives turned against Nixon because of hard evidence laid out by popular unbiased news, which at the time conservatives still were informed by.

The Frankenstein’s monster of a party that that tactic has turned conservatives into requires manufactured rage to fuel the fire. If the outrage ever simmers, you begin to see smarter conservatives recognizing what their party has become and it begins to fall apart.

So there’s your answer. It’s because the hate is necessary to continue the control. If you don’t believe me, turn on Fox news. There’s always the manufactured rage-of-the-day filling the air time.

It’s the only card he’s still holding that means anything to the western nations he’s in a proxy war with.

Nobody wants a nuclear war, which is why he’s betting on western nations erring on the side of caution when he does shit like this.